Inside LabourStart

Azerbaijan campaign: This now appears in 11 languages with more on the way, and has 2,876 supporters. That number will grow as mailings in the additional languages go out, and following a reminder message to the English list going out later today. This is our first campaign to appear in Azeri and we now have a (small) mailing list for the first time in that language. We got some wonderful publicity about the campaign on this important news site covering the South Caucasus region: International labour movement launches campaign to free detained labour activists in Azerbaijan

Turkey (teachers) campaign: This appears in 13 languages and already has 3,265 supporters which is expected to grow significantly for the same reasons mentioned above.

Alamo Cinema campaign: The union sent us this – “Labourstart proved to be a helpful ally during our strike and we appreciate the work they do and they support they give.” We will share this with our supporters today.

Iran: Yesterday Eric Lee spoke on a panel on a dissident, pro-democracy Iranian TV channel (broadcasting from outside the country). Among other participants in the event was teacher trade unionist Esmail Abdi, who was subject of more than one LabourStart campaign following his arrests.

Interns: Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labour Relations has found 14 students to apply to be a LabourStart correspondent this fall. We have reviewed the applications and created a shortlist of six and will begin interviews next week.

Podcasts: We interviewed US trade unionist Debbie Goldman who has written a book, Disconnected, about organising call centre workers in the US. That interview already has a significant number of downloads even though we haven’t really done a lot of publicity yet. Our podcast page on Buzzsprout now features a significantly longer “podroll” than before. If anyone wants to suggest other union podcasts to include here, please let us know.

USA: We wrote to the Solidarity Center, which has brought legal action against the Trump administration for cutting off their funds, offering to help in any way we can, and reminding them how helpful the Solidarity Center was with our most recent Global Solidarity Conference in Tbilisi.

Donors: We have just under 1,000 people on our new donors’ mailing list, and are regularly sending them updates which are NOT appeals for more money. One of these updates went out earlier this week.

It’s been a busy week.

Azerbaijan campaign: This has now gone live in English and Azerbaijani versions. We will send it out for translation into more languages on Monday.

Belarus campaign: LabourStart activists participated in the ITUC-hosted webinar to mark the global day of action. We reached out to all participants and managed to get commitments from several to boost awareness of the campaign. We also got translations done into Polish and Romanian. This is our largest current campaign with 4,374 supporters.

New York City Alamo campaign: This ended in a victory for the workers, which we shared on our news page, across social media and in a mass mailing. Our campaign has now been shut down.

Nike campaign: We closed this down after Global Labor Justice gave us permission to do so. The results of the campaign were somewhat disappointing.

Turkey – teachers campaign: This campaign also went live this week, in English and translations have now begun coming in.

Turkey – Telus/TikTok campaign: We did a dedicated mailing to our Canadian list (Telus is a Canadian company).

Older campaigns: We’ve closed down all the remaining campaigns from 2024. In most cases, unfortunately, the campaign partners did not respond to our messages, so we don’t know the results of our effort.

Ukraine: There are reports that some FPU leaders are under house arrest. We reached out to learn more, but there is almost nothing in English online.

Dutch LabourStart: We had a 30 minute call with one of our few remaining active correspondents in the Netherlands and discussed reviving our Dutch language page.

News: There was a small problem – when a story was tagged with two countries, and given a higher priority, that wasn’t taken into account on the second country’s page. This has now been fixed. We’ve also removed links to sign up to our mailing list (which could only be found on the state/province news pages.) Nearly everyone who joins our list does so by signing up to a campaign.

Interns: Cornell University has sent on details of 14 prospective interns.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew again this week by 100 — 89 of them for the English list.

Podcasts: We’re arranging an interview with a former union official in the US who has written a book about call centre workers.

Belarus: We continue to ramp up activities in the run up to the 16 April global day of solidarity. This week we publicised our interview with the ITUC’s Luc Triangle. As of this morning, it has been downloaded 104 times.  Our campaign has grown to 4,150 supporters and appears in 14 languages.

Iran: We’ve been invited to speak at an online May Day event organised by emigre groups (on 24.4).  More details soon.

Thailand: With the permission of IndustriALL, we closed our YPC campaign this week.  The campaign had 4,930 supporters and appeared in 16 languages. The campaign did not result in a victory for the workers, unfortunately.

Turkey: It looks like we will launch a new campaign shortly. Meanwhile, Kivanc has a great article in Labor Notes about the Telus struggle.  We’ll be sending out a special mailing to our Canadian list about this.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by 90 new subscribers this week, due to new campaign supporters being added — mostly to the English list.

Android app: We are now in discussions with two developers about this, and are exploring a “no-code” solution as well.

Podcasts: We launched one new podcast this week (Nilufar Mammadrzayeva from Labor Desk in Azerbaijan) and recorded another to be released next week (Luc Triangle from the ITUC on Belarus).  Meanwhile our interview with Mark Hancock from CUPE (Canada) is our most popular one so far, with 529 downloads.  See all our podcasts here.

Social media: We went live with our WhatsApp channel which is starting with 20 subscribers.  I would not be surprised if this soon grows to be larger than our Telegram channel with its 134 subscribers.

Campaigns:  We’ve written to our partners for our five oldest campaigns and will soon be closing these.  We hope to launch our Azerbaijan campaign next week.

Donations: We received a very generous donation from EPSU this week.

Interns: We heard from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labour Relations (USA) and they are keen for us to take on new interns.  We’ll begin interviewing candidates next week.  Meanwhile our current intern, Isabel, who also started as Cornell intern for us, will be finishing her work with LabourStart at the end of this month.

The best news this week: Following a LabourStart campaign, our brother Ismet Aslan from Turkey has been released from prison after 6 months. Read more here.

Campaigns: We launched three new campaigns in the last two weeks.

• Our Belarus campaign grew to 3,098 supporters — a gain of 79 this week.
• Our Nike campaign grew to 2,197, a gain of about 1,450 this week.
• And our newest campaign, in support of striking workers at Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas in New York, grew to 2,336, a gain of 766 this week.

Next campaign: Next week we are likely to launch a new campaign in support of jailed trade unionists in Azerbaijan. Stay tuned.

Podcasts: Our most recent podcast, Pat Bulmer’s interview with the president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Mark Hancock, has been downloaded over 470 times in the last 8 days. It is our most successful podcast after, reaching a much wider audience than usual. We hope that this will get more people to subscribe to our podcasts, and to check out the podcasts we have already done.

News: Our correspondents posted over 3,500 news stories on LabourStart in March, averaging close to 128 per day.

Donations: We were very pleased to receive another generous donation from our friends at the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF).

Belarus: Our new campaign is now live and translations are pouring in. As fo 14:00 GMT today, the campaign (in English only) had 1,825 supporters — that’s after just one day online. Eric’s article on Belarus was widely circulated and will help to raise awareness of the campaign.

Nike: Our campaign in support of Asian women who work for Nike is going live in the next day or two. This is our first partnership with Global Labor Justice.

Other campaigns: We may be shortly launching a campaign in support of striking workers in the US. Details soon.

Swag: We have found a good, left-wing, unionised provider in the UK and are aiming to get new t-shirts, mugs and maybe caps ready in the next few weeks. We sold 597 of our previous t-shirts, earning £4,250 and hope to raise the same amount — or more — with the new products.

Podcasts: It looks like our next interviews will be with a leading Canadian trade unionist and with the people organising an international conference on strikes taking place later this month. (We will also interview some of the participants in that conference.). If you have any suggestions for people for us to interview, please get in touch!

Donations: We continue to be impressed with support from many individuals but also from their unions. We’ve received generous donations in the last few weeks from IndustriALL global union, the Education International, BCGEU (Canada) and Styrke (Norway).

Mailing lists: The lists continue to grow as new campaigns bring in new supporters. We added 67 new subscribers to the lists just before going live with our Belarus campaign — which will no doubt bring in more.

International Women’s Day: First of all, greetings to all working women from LabourStart! Our Working Women’s news page is absolutely full of news this year – check it out: https://www.labourstart.org/women/

Belarus: We are almost certainly going ahead with a campaign in the next few weeks. We also shared our interview with Liza, which went live this week — it already had 175 downloads, which is the same as last year’s interview. It will certainly reach a much larger audience this year.

Podcast interviews: We continue to search for interviewees, including folowing up with trade union leaders who have already agreed to do this.

Interns: Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations has asked if we want more interns this coming all. We said yes.

Young workers: Our Young Workers news page now has a “toolkit” for young trade unionists (mostly for the USA).

Swag: We’re looking for partners to help us produce and sell LabourStart branded products like t-shirts and mugs. Finding ones that are unionised is harder than you’d think. One UK-based company which initially looked like a good fit — “Certified Organic Products; Powered by Renewable Energy; Circular Design” — whose customers included a wide range of progressive charities and NGOs turns out to have a non-union workforce, which is a deal-breaker for us.

International Union Rights: We are probably going to try again to promote sales of this excellent journal, in a partnership with ICTUR. Apparently, it did quite well last time for them and for us.

Instagram: We have our first reel (video) and it’s gotten quite a few views (256). This is quite good considering that we only have 689 followers on the platform.

Fund-raising: Another generous donation from a Norwegian union arrived this week.

Inside LabourStart: We’ve had to disable the mailing list plugin for this blog as it had stopped working properly. We’ll find new ways of letting people know when the blog is updated.

Campaigns: Our Telus campaign in Turkey grew by just 130 new supporters this week. The launch of the French language version will help, but this campaign is still far too small and comrades are encouraged to promote it more widely. We have several other campaigns in the pipeline.

Podcasts: Our third podcast of the year, with Kivanç Eliaçik, is already our most popular this year, with 200 downloads so far. Today we interviewed Liza Merliak from Belarus for our 4th podcast of the year, going live in the next few days.

News: In the first 27 days of February, our volunteer correspondents posted on average 104 news stories per day, a small decline compared to earlier in the month. But the number of volunteer correspondents posting news has grown by 26% since the end of 2024. Last week we did our second regular, monthly mailing to correspondents — this has helped to increase the involvement of some.

Fundraising: We’ve asked for help from the e-campaigning community in finding a PayPal alternative, which we could use in addition to PayPal. As we reported earlier, our supporters in New Zealand can’t use PayPal to donate to us, and other issues have come up in other countries.

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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.

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Podcasting: Our first podcast interview this year has gone live (thanks Pat!), a second one has been recorded and a third interview is scheduled for Monday. We are on course for one podcast interview every week in 2025, which will be great. This week we also fixed a bug — all the non-English LabourStart home pages were showing a wrong link for the podcasts. (Thanks Espen for pointing this out.)

Campaigns: We have several in the pipeline, including in Turkey, Thailand, Myanmar and Liberia. More details soon.

Fundraising: All the translations of our fundraising message have gone out, but the total income has not increased significantly. We will do a followup mailing to the English list which should help.

Next generation: We held a meeting with former interns and have begun work on a Young Workers news page. One of our interns, Isabel, is back with us for three months, starting this week.

News: With well over 3,000 news stories posted this month, we’re averaging over 104 per day — a very big increase compared to the first nine days of January when the average was just 78 per day. The number of active correspondents is growing, up 15% compared to last month. Our goal is to increase the number of active correspondents three-fold this year, so we are on course.