Inside LabourStart

Correspondents: We have a new form and it works. We signed up three new correspondents this week — from Georgia, Ireland and Spain. We also reached out again to our lists in South Africa and Ireland in an attempt to recruit more correspondents; other countries will follow now that we see the form is working.

News: We added about 720 news stories in the last week, which is a signficantly higher number per day than we were experiencing earlier this month. The number of active correspondents this month is up by 10% compared to last month and we expect that to grow.

Podcasting: We’ve lined up the first three podcasts for 2025, starting next week. Please suggest more names for people for us to interview — we want, if possible, to do one show every week.

Fundraising: In the last week, due to fundraising messages to our supporters, we raised £2,021.88. We also received a pledge of £2,809.22 from a union in Canada. We also received a €400 donation from a Danish union. So, a very good week for us. (But we also got our tax bill, which wipes out a lot of that gain.)

Next generation: We polled our former interns and will have our next online meeting next week.

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Campaigns: We’ve given our Georgia campaign a boost in a mass mailing; it is our smallest current campaign with just over 4,100 supporters. We’ve also helped to raise money for the strikers there via the UNI website, and we made a donation on behalf of LabourStart. We’ve been approached about possible campaigns this week in Turkey and Uganda. We also asked about a possible campaign on Iran.

Podcasts: We interviewed one of the Evolution Gaming strikers this week — our first podcast in several weeks.

Mailing lists: In the course of moving back and forth between systems, we lost the country names for a lot of subscribers. But now we’ve written software that reads through our campaign supporters database and updates our mailing list — and tested this on our Canadian supporters. It turns out the 20% of our mailing list are Canadians. This allows us to do targetted mailings based on country.  Our list has grown significantly as well with almost 6,000 new subscribers, all from Canada, being added. We will do this for other countries as well.

Mailings: We did three mailings to our English list this week, which is a lot for us. These included promotions for the winners of the LabourStart CLIFF video award, the Arthur Svensson international prize for trade union rights, and our latest podcast (see above).

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted 1,432 news stories in the first 14 days of November, averaging over 100 per day. Unfortunately, only 32 correspondents were active during this period and we need to find way to reactivate the many inactive ones — and recruit new ones.

Finances: Our appeals to our supporters have led to some very generous donations, both by individuals and unions. Our financial situation is still by no means secure, but it is considerably better than where it was in early September. We fixed the ‘Donate’ link on our home pages in all languages to offer more donation options in more currencies.  Among those unions which have made donations in the last couple of weeks were the European Transport Workers Federation (ETF), European Public Service Union (EPSU), Canadian Staff Union, and The Society (Canada).

Campaigns: We will shortly be closing our three oldest campaigns — from Eswatini, Serbia and Czechia. That will leave us with four active campaigns. Two weeks ago, I closed the China campaign (in support of jailed journalists).

CLIFF: LabourStart will shortly be announcing the recipient of an award we give out each year to a film shown as part of the Canadian Labour International Film Festival.

Podcasts: We interviewed an activist from the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island, New York.

LabourStart’s Eric Lee with strikers at Evolution Gaming, in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Apologies for the late update of this blog; I was travelling in Georgia for most of this period.

During my time there I was able to meet three times with strikers at Evolution Gaming (see photo) where some 5,000 young workers have been on strike since mid-July. During one of those meetings, at a rally in front of the Evolution headquarters, I was asked to say a few words — part of the which the union shared online. We increased the number of sign-ups in the Georgian language and discussed next steps, including fund-raising to support the strikers.

While in Georgia, I also learned that an interview with me that took place a year ago appeared on the front page of the newspaper of the Ukrainian atomic workers union.

Marc Belanger has announced that Radio Labour’s International programme is shutting down after many years of great service to the international trade union movement. Our LabourStart podcasts can help take up the slack. As we reported a few weeks ago, our interview with trade unionists from Taiwan has become our most popular podcast so far, with just under 400 downloads. None of the other podcasts we’ve done have come even close to this.

I noticed that our Jobs page did not indicate how one submitted jobs to LabourStart. Now, on top of the page, it reads: “Want to post a job here? If you are a LabourStart volunteer correspondent, you can do this yourself. If you’re not a correspondent, email us at ericlee@labourstart.org.”

30 September was International Translation Day and I took the opportunity to write to all our translators, thanking them and telling them how important their work is.

And finally, a couple of the larger donations we were expecting came through — from the German education union GEW and from CUPE, the public sector union in Canada. We will need to do much more to restore LabourStart’s finances in the next few weeks and months.

After just 24 hours, and with 297 downloads, it looks like this one will soon be our most popular.

Our previous record was 311.

And we’re getting ‘fan mail’ sent via BuzzSprout and email:

Nice to hear your voice, Eric, and well worth a listen. – Paul Booth

I appreciate the Labour Start Podcast on the striking workers at the port(s) in Taiwan. All of these struggles affect workers everywhere. I will share this. – New Westminster, BC

I liked it, and I appreciate everything that Eric does and how long he’s done it. For me, the short interview is fine, but it could have been longer. I’m in my car, and have more time to listen. The interview was a little unclear because I did not understand initially who the union represents. I understand now that they are crews who crew ocean-going ships, as opposed to dock workers or other workers in the maritime industry. – Dover, New Hampshire

Had a chance to listen to interview with union president, Carlos Ching-Hung Wang. It was short enough I could fit it in to my available time. Second language aided authentic feeling about it. Thanks. –  Ken Collier, North Bay, Ontario, Canada

Sounds like ‘fire and hire’ has hit Taiwan’s seafarers! It’s a low-down tactic wherever it is used! – United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Can you share addresses for the entities that Brother Carlos Ching-Hung Wong mentioned so that we can write to them? – Naperville, Illinois

LabourStart correspondents meeting, August 2024.

Correspondents: We had the first meeting of LabourStart correspondents in a very long time. We had participants from nearly all continents, most of them veteran correspondents, but a couple of brand new ones as well. We will convene these meetings quarterly from now on.

Mailings: We did our first A/B testing of a mass mailing for a very long time, in a mailing promoting the podcasts and campaigns in support of workers at Liberty Steel (Czechia) and Yura (Serbia).

Mailing lists: These grew by 42 this week (last week we added 129). Growth will continue to be slow because it is August and many of our supporters are on holiday, with many union offices closed.

Podcasts: We did a second interview this summer with Judith Kirton-Darling of IndustriAll Europe on the subject of the Liberty Steel campaign (Czechia).

News: In the first half of August (15 days), our volunteer correspondents posted 1,440 news stories — not bad considering how many union websites are closed for the month, with websites not being updated. Our most active correspondents in August were Derek, Eric, Patrick, Kyle, and Pat.

New campaign – Czechia: At the request of IndustriALL and IndustriAll Europe, we launched this campaign on 31.7. By today, it already had 1,721 supporters.

Serbia campaign and podcast: This campaign now appears in quite a few languages and we interviewed a comrade there, sharing this as our podcast. With 3,215 supporters after less than two weeks online, this is already our second largest online campaign. We’ve picked up almost 900 new supporters in the last seven days.

Campaign submission form: The form broke a few months ago — people were submitting campaigns and they were not reaching us. We’ve now migrated the form over to Jotform and this seems to work quite well — and it’s free.

Mailing lists: We finally closed down the Mailchimp account, having migrated all our lists back to Mailjet.

Correspondents: We’ve invited all correspondents to an online meetup later this month; this weekend, we’ll confirm the day and time.

News: On the first day of August our volunteer correspondents posted a whopping 133 news stories. The most active correspondents were Derek, Eric, Roy, Patrick and Pat. Who says August is a quiet month?

Congress of the Education International: We’ve offered complete coverage of this based on stories posted on their website, and publicised this fact widely across social media.

Campaigns: We launched our first new campaign since April – China: Release jailed journalists and media workers now. Two more campaigns are in the pipeline, in Serbia and Georgia, and we have reached out to help a union in Bangladesh as well.

Podcasts: We released another podcast this week — an interview with David Edwards, the general secretary of the Education International. Meanwhile, last week’s interview, with Judith Kirton-Darling of IndustriAll Europe, has had more downloads than the previous six podcasts we released.

Mailing lists: After a series of false starts, we have started migrating our lists away from the very expensive MailChimp to MailJet, which we have used before. So far, the process seems relatively painless.  This should save us a considerable amount of money.

T-shirts: While we are unlikely to have t-shirts available in time for the Labour Day holiday in North America, we have made contact with a unionised workers’ coop in the US which can create an online store for us to sell not only t-shirts, but other union swag as well (hats, mugs, etc.) This could help us improve our finances in the future.

News: In the first 12 days of July, our volunteer correspondents posted 1,200 news stories — exactly 100 stories per day. The most active correspondents were Derek Blackadder, Eric Lee, Patrick Craven, Kyle Webster, and Pat Bulmer.

Victory in Egypt: We suspended our campaign in support of the Mahalla textile workers following receipt of the news that the two remaining jailed union activists have now been freed.

Zimbabwe: We were approached by a union whose leader has been jailed and we reached out to the Education International. We’re now having discussions with them about how we can help.

New campaigns: We have reached out to a number of unions as we are about to run out of live campaigns. There are several good prospects, though we may shortly face a situation where we have no current campaigns on our home page.  I will be tweaking our home page software to cope with that situation.

Podcasts: We didn’t release a new podcast this week, though we do have one that needs some editing and will be released shortly. We have a number of people to followup with to ensure that we continue released one new show each week.

News: In the first 30 days of May, our 44 active volunteer correspondents posted 3,525 news stories, an average of 117 per day. This is a big increase compared to a week ago, as we added nearly 1,000 stories this week. The top 5 correspondents who have posted the most news stories this month are (in order) Derek, Eric, Patrick, Pat and Espen.

Fixed bug: Previously, when looking at news from a particular country, if you selected ‘all languages’ it would only show English stories in the top 10, on the left side the page. I have now fixed this to work correctly.

Clicky: We briefly used this service to trace hits to our site, but have not done so for many years. Following reminders from the company, I have now removed all references to Click from our site.

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.