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.

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).

A very busy week at LabourStart as we launched two new campaigns, a new podcast, and our brand-new LabourStart-branded mugs and t-shirts.

Campaign Number 1: USA: Support striking workers at Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas. This campaign went live on Thursday and has already been translated into several languages. In its first 24 hours online it picked up 1,570 supporters.

Campaign Number 2: Nike: Women workers demand justice. Launched this morning and had over 750 supporters in the first few hours. Campaign is live in English, Spanish and Turkish.

Campaign Number 3: Belarus: Stop repression, free jailed trade unionists. Launched a bit more than a week ago, the campaign now appears in 13 languages and has 3,019 supporters — a gain of about 1,200 this week.

Podcasts: This week Pat Bulmer interviewed the National President of Canada’s largest union, CUPE. The interview is exceptionally good — and has had a great response. It is shaping up to be what is possibly our most popular podcast, and it will be aired on radio stations in both the USA and Australia too.

T-shirts and mugs: Working together with the Trade Union Football & Alcohol Committee in the UK, we have produced these lovely items for sale. Check them out here.

News: And meanwhile, our volunteer correspondents have posted, on average, 128 news stories every day so far in March. That’s a huge increase since February, when they were posting about 104 stories per day.

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.

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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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.

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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It was a quiet week with most trade union offices closed — but it was also the week that Amazon and Starbucks workers made the news with unprecedented strike actions in different countries.

Georgia: The Evolution strikers proposed a new text for a new campaign, which we are discussing with them.

News: Despite a slowdown in labour news due to holiday season union office shutdowns, our correspondents have posted 1,969 links — about 73 news stories a day. Big thanks to Derek, Eric, Espen, Kyle and Pat for leading the way.

Norway: LO Oslo has now pledged a generous donation.

Urdu language campaigns: We are nearly there, just need to tweak some things on the landing page.