Inside LabourStart

Campaigns:

• The Cambodia campaign is doing very well — after just a week, we’re up to well over 10,000 messages sent, making it our second largest current campaign (Kazakhstan is the largest).
• We just launched a campaign yesterday in defense of Colombian unions; it picked up some 4,300 supporters in the 24 hours online.
• We closed the previous Colombia campaign just in time after it ran for three full months.  Huber is, unfortunately, still in jail.

Berlin 2014:

• I participated on Saturday in a very good meeting with four members of our organizing committee in Berlin.  Gisela and I also agreed a number of changes to LabourStart’s German language page, some of which have been done.  These include some new pages about LabourStart, a registration form for new correspondents, and so on.
• The total number of people registered is now 280, up 20 in the last week.  Of those, 59 are from Germany and 42 from the UK (meaning that of those 20 new ones, 7 come from the UK and Germany).
• I wrote to the more than 100 people who’ve requested help getting a visa to clarify once again that we cannot help with airfares and to ask for some more details; about 19 have responded so far.
• The TUC is offering us a room to convene a meeting of people from the UK who have registered, or are thinking about coming to Berlin; we’ll hold this in February.
• We’re doing a lot of targetting of specific countries; Tom is doing some work focussing on the closest neighbours to Berlin: Poland, the Czech Republic and Denmark.
• I contacted the ITUC two days ago asking for a meeting when I’m in Brussels but no answer yet.
• I fixed the link to the conference on our home pages in all languages — it now points to the right place.

LabourStart Books:

• Dan Gallin has sent us 12 essays with 3 more to come; we’re exploring new ways to produce this as we’re not happy with CreateSpace’s service and will probably use Lulu (who did our calendar).  Our aim is the get the book out fairly quickly and certainly well in advance of the Berlin conference.

Correspondents:

• I continue with weekly mailings; this time, I aimed to encourage yet again inactive correspondents.  After 24 hours, we saw a result — a 10% increase in the number of correspondents posting news (up from 78 to 85 this month) and increase in stories (up by 326 in just one day — the previous daily average was just 167).
• We added several new correspondents this week.

French LabourStart:

• We continue to make progress, having made at least half a dozen fixes this week.  Some of them are small fixes to all languages and are contributing to making the site more useful for non-English speakers.

Canadian LabourStart:

• I moved some things around on the page at Derek’s request; it looks better now.

Country pages:

• I’ve fixed the search, which now always brings up the new pages.
• I’ve also created a search on all languages, which we had on the old site but hadn’t preserved.

Fundraising:

• It’s been a week since we launched our quarterly appeal to “power users” (people who’ve supported 3 or more campaigns in the last year).  Results have been good — we’ve taken in just over £4,000 in donations this week.  This is similar to how we did last April, and probably better than the two appeals since then.

Travel:

• I’ll be travelling for most of the next two weeks — all of next week in Istanbul as a guest of KESK, to participate in the opening of the trial of their activists.  The following week I’ll be in Geneva and then Brussels.  This may mean slower response times to emails, but I hope you’ll all understand.

In the first few hours of our quarterly fund-raising appeal, we’ve raised over £1,500. We’ve had 35 donations so far in 5 different currencies, and pledges of more to come.

By comparison, in our previous appeal (October) we managed to raise £2,985 in the first 3 days — and £2,188 of that in the first 21 hours. In July we did poorly, raising only £1,844 in the first 10 days online. And last April we raised about £4,050 in the first week of the campaign. So it’s a good start …

The message went out to 22,560 people who have signed up to 3 LabourStart campaigns or more in the last 12 months. This is about 10% larger than the list we used in October.

Campaigns:

• We’ve closed the Korean teachers’ campaign and will soon be receiving a report back on the results.
• The Cambodia campaign, launched yesterday, is taking off very quickly — already considerably larger than the Carnival (Crown Holdings) campaign launched a week earlier.
• We’re now running our first campaign ever in Ukrainian.

Berlin 2014:

• I’m off to Berlin tomorrow with Tom to meet with the organizing committee.
• At the moment we have 260 registrants for the conference, 54 of them from Germany, 40 from the UK.
• We’ve updated the database adding a number of new fields to begin recording where people will stay, their flight details, contact phone numbers, etc. This information will be added by the conference organizers.

Books:

We’ve just heard from Dan Gallin that he’s assembled the texts for our next book, which we can now begin to produce and sell.  This will be LabourStart’s fourth book.

Mailing lists:

We had a problem with Sendy, trying to resolve it with help from them.

French edition:

Derek and Andy have made several suggestions for improvements which we’ve begun to implement.

Fundraising:

• We’re about to do the quarterly fundraising mailing to people who regularly support our online campaigns.
• I’ve also written to all our correspondents about the Svensson prize (having already told our entire list about it) and fingers crossed maybe this year LabourStart will be considered for this.

Newswires:

We now have a Vietnamese English-language newswire at the request of our comrades in Australia, and it appears on the website of the committee to protect Vietnamese workers.

News database:

We’re adding additional languages to allow new correspondents to post news without having to deal with an English interface. The Finnish one is now ready and others are on their way.

I’ve not been updating this regularly enough, but a lot’s been going on over the last 24 days.

Berlin 2014: I just returned from a short visit to Berlin where I met our organizing committee.  The conference opens in a little more than 6 months and so far we’ve got a venue (Ver.di headquarters), an organizing committee, a registration form and a blog full of information — so far, so food.  Please make sure to register if you plan to come.

Kiev 2013: We had a very successful meeting of LabourStart correspondents (and potential correspondents), and our first ever rock concert last week.  See details below.  Followup has included the translation of additional pages into Russian, and signing up some new correspondents.

Firefox OS book: This was published on 24 October; sales so far have not been as high as expected, but we have sold over 140 of them.  If you’ve read the book, please make sure to post reviews to Amazon.  If you don’t have the book, please order a copy now.

The LabourStart Calendar 2014: We need to work harder to promote sales.  We sold 164 last time I reported to you, and in the last 24 days — just 11 more.  Please do what you can to promote this.

Intern: We have hired Tom Harris, who began work 8 days ago.  Edd continues to work with us one day a week.

Campaigns: Last time I reported, we were at 10,100 messages for our most recent campaign (Colombia); in the last 24 days we’ve picked up about 800 more.  We closed our Peru campaign.

Donations: We’ve received substantial donations from the FDHT in Geneva and the RMT union in London.

Upcoming travel: In December, I’ve been invited to speak about online campaigning at a conference in Freiburg, Germany.  In January, Tom and I will go to Berlin for another meeting with the conference organizers.  At the end of that month, I’ll be in Brussels to help the European Trade Union Institute plan a course — initiated by the German national trade union center DGB — on the subject of unions and the net.

Book 3: Now completed, published, and waiting for the first paper copy to arrive before we officially announce it.  A draft web page is already live — http://www.labourstart.org/firefoxos — and will be improved before launch, probably tomorrow.

Intern: We have a shortlist of five intern candidates and will interview them this Friday.

Berlin 2014: I’ll be visiting Berlin next week, meeting with our organizing committee there plus others.  We should be able to launch the conference website by then, and begin online registrations.

This is how you promote LabourStart: See below for the table Derek set up at the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) convention where he’s been selling our calendars and books and making great connections for LabourStart.

Colombia campaign: After just 8 days, this is our second largest campaign ever, with just over 10,100 messages sent — over 100 of them from Colombia.

Calendar sales: Continue to be disappointing, but growing slowly.  In October, we sold just 30 copies of the calendar; in September, we sold more than four times that number — 134 copies.  I continue with weekly reminders via social media, and we mentioned it in a recent mass mailing.  We’ll continue with this in the hope that as 2014 approaches, people will begin to buy their calendars …

Blog action day: I used this to help promote some of our campaigns — but there’s no evidence it helped at all.

Donations: We received once again a large donation from LO Norway.

Newswires: I checked to see if there was a problem with one of our French newswires — there wasn’t, and with one of our Finnish newswire — there was, and I’ve not yet been able to solve the problem.

Campaigns: We launched two new campaigns – in support of striking workers at Crown Holdings in Toronto, and in support of the Korean teachers’ and public service unions, threatened with deregistration by their government.  The former is up to over 7,300 messages sent, and the latter, after just a couple of days, is already up to just under 6,800.  Following the release of jailed Canadian trade unionist John Greyson in Egypt, we were able to close down the campaign.  We also used one of our mass mailings to promote the IUF’s campaign in support of jailed independent trade unionists in China.  The UN workers campaign, with nearly 14,000 messages sent, is our largest current campaign, and one of the largest we’ve ever done.

Calendar and Book Sales:  In its first month, our LabourStart wall calendar for 2014 has sold 144 copies, an average of about five per day.  I did another push this week which generated only two new sales in two days.  Book sales totalled 1,664 as of earlier this week — with 959 of those being the campaigning book in English.

Book 3: Jeremy Green and I have completed a first draft of our book on Firefox OS for Activists.  We’re making some final tweaks today and tomorrow and hope to have it ready on Monday.

Public events: I spoke at the European Trade Union Institute seminar in Brussels on lobbying the institutions of the EU last week; the ETUI purchased 30 copies of our campaigning book.  Last Saturday, I spoke to nearly 100 activists from UNISON Wales in Cardiff, and sold all 10 campaigning books I brought with me.

Berlin 2014: While in Brussels, I had a chance to meet up with ITUC staff to discuss coordinating our efforts.  In Berlin, meanwhile, we’ve set up a meeting at the Friedrich Ebert foundation for the day I arrive, later this month.

Fundraising: I did the quarterly appeal to our power users, and the mailing this time reached 20,164.  Ten days into the previous appeal, in July, we’d raised only £1,843.72.  This time, we’ve raised £3,191.93 in the same period — a gain of 73%.

Intern: We received about 40 applications for our internship; we’re completing the shortlist today and tomorrow and will do interviews within two weeks.

Here are the totals for the first 3 days of October:

PayPal payments £2,831.53

Cheques £87.00

Bank transfers £66.00

TOTAL £2,984.53 (US$4,793.67)

By comparison, 10 days into the July appeal, we had raised only £1,843.72, so we’re up by 62% — after only 3 days.

But our April appeal did better, and we raised about £4,050 one week into the campaign.  We did ask people to donate $50 in April and only $25 today.

Maybe this time we’ll match that … if we can raise another £1,000 in the next few days.

Yesterday I mailed to 20,164 people who have supported at least 3 of our campaigns in the last 12 months.  The last time we did this, 3 months ago, we mailed to a smaller number (19,962) and got a considerably smaller response.  Last time, five days into the appeal, we had raised US$2,283.  Today, just 21 hours into the appeal, we’ve raised 57% more money — with US$3,594 coming in so far.  For math buffs among you, that’s $171.14 per hour.  If this continues for another 8 hours, and it’s unlikely that it will, we’ll raise $5,000 by this evening, which would be fantastic and unprecedented for us.

As I was travelling, there were few updates to this blog during this period.  So here are some highlights:

Campaigns: In my absence, we launched a new campaign in support of public sector workers in Peru.  Edd has followed up with translators for missing languages in our earlier campaigns.  We have a new Canadian campaign as well, and have closed down the funeral home campaign there.  We helped Amnesty promote their new campaign protesting death threats against Colombian trade unionists.  We’ve received permission from DISK to close down the Turkey campaign — our largest ever — but are aware that there will almost certainly be the need for followup campaigns.

Books: CreateSpace is still dithering, not paying us the royalties owed.  I’ve shipped 60 copies of our global labour movement book to the International Domestic Workers Network who will be distributing them to delegates to their international congress in Montevideo in October.  Jeremy Green and I are working intensively on our third LabourStart book and hope to have a draft ready in the next week or two.  All our books now appear on our new publications page on LabourStart.

Calendar: Edd and I are in the final stages of preparation for the 2014 LabourStart Calendar which we hope to sell lots of copies of.

Internationalization: Our Italian news page has come to life again thanks to new correspondents.   We’ve sent out a special appeal to our Hindi language list to get more people involved.

Upcoming events: I’ve been asked to speak at a Unison Wales event on campaigning in October — this will be my third visit to Unison Wales in the last year or so.  That same week, I’ll be speaking at a European Trade Union Institute event in Brussels.  In November, we have the Kiev event, mentioned earlier.

Global Solidarity Conference 2014 – Berlin: The committee will be meeting there this week.  We’re awaiting a phone call from the ITUC regarding the final dates and then we’ll send these out in a ‘save the date’ message.  I’ll go to Berlin probably in September for a first meeting with the committee and to see venues.

Donations: We’ve received a substantial donation from the IUF, as well as donations from unions in the UK, India, Canada and elsewhere.

Campaigns:

We closed two campaigns last week – the very short Bangladesh campaign which did flood the labour minister with messages and for which the ITUC was grateful, and the Mitsui Vancouver port campaign, which had run for the full three months.  We launched two new campaigns together with the ITF and IndustriALL on India and the Philippines.  Meanwhile, our newly-globalized Canada campaign is well above 9,000 messages sent.

Books:

We’re proceeding at a good clip with the research and writing of our third book this year.  More details at the end of August.

Sales of the first book (campaigns) rose substantially from just 7 sold in July to 32 (including 15 distributed at the Global Labour Institute summer school).  Sales of the second book (global labour movement) rose in July from 11 to 31, also including 15 at the GLI event.

2014 Conferences:

There’s been a draft paper written about the Vancouver (Canada) conference to be held in the fall of 2014.  And a small organizing committee is to meet in August in Berlin to make further plans for the May 2014 conference there.

Fundraising:

Unite the Union, Britain’s largest, made a substantial donation, as pledged.  The total amount donated to LabourStart in July is £3,549.

Internationalization:

We now have campaigns in Hindi — something we’ve been planning for 5 years and now finally realized.

We’ve also decided to focus much more on the languages where we already have substantial mailing lists, but for which we do not always have translations of campaigns and mailings.  The top five language priorities for us are English, French, Spanish, Italian and Turkish.  We’re working to make sure that the top 10 languages, all of which have mailing lists of 1,000 or more, are translated for each campaign, and a mailing done each time.  (The other five languages — also very high priorities for us — are German, Norwegian, Russian, Dutch and Chinese.)

Meetings in the real world:

Edd attended the GLI summer school and wrote up an account (see below).
Eric had a meeting with Elizabeth Tang, head of the International Domestic Workers Network and we discussed many potential areas of cooperation.