Inside LabourStart

Time for a second look?

We used to sell LabourStart-branded stuff here.

There was some concern that the products were made not only by non-union labour, but under less-than-ideal conditions (e.g., in China).

Does anyone want to take a second look now?

Maybe they offer a more ethical range (i.e., union-made or at least ethically produced products).

Many, many websites use CafePress to raise money, and we might be able to do so as well – but don’t want to be accused of selling sweatshop goods.

First of all, my goal of 10,000 messages in the Canada Post campaign by the weekend turned out to be not ambitious enough.  It’s only Thursday and we already have 11,213 messages sent.  Unfortunately, the Colombia Vale campaign launched the same day, has received only one-fifth as many supporters – 2,455.  Which raises some questions in my mind about how we go about building the global campaigning capacity of the international trade union movement.  I intend to address these in a column I’ll be writing later today for Solidarity, a British weekly.

Conference registrations are not exactly flooding in — but at least today I’ve sorted out some error processing.  If you try to sign up without giving your name, or an email address, or a country (e.g., you leave ‘Select a country’ as your choice), you’ll be prompted to fix these.  You might think, who would register without giving such basic details, but a significant percentage of those who fill in the form leave out their name, country and email – which are the basic things we need.

Finally, a £500 donation from a union in New Zealand has pushed us very close to the £20,000 mark in this year’s May Day fundraising campaign.  This is great news, but we can do better — and I’ll be following up today with 6 unions which last year donated a total of £7,000.  While the amount of money coming in is nearly double what we raised last year, and that’s great, this is nothing as compared to what other groups manage to raise.  We can do so much better if we try.

Campaigns: I’ve done a mass mailing to our English list announcing the two new campaigns (Russia, El Salvador) and the release of Rosalba in Colombia (subject of a campaign of ours last winter). We also promoted Amnesty International’s Iran campaign, the ITUC annual survey, and a contest sponsored by UCS.  Last week we suggested a super-campaign to the ITUC based around their annual survey, but we’ve gotten no answer from them. We’ve gotten permission to close down the Chile campaign after 3 months and have asked permission to close down the Botswana one as the strike is now over.  Once again at the request of the RMT union we launched a UK-specific campaign and did a mailing to the more than 5,000 UK subscribers on our lists.  Nearly 700 messages have already been sent.

Conference: Work continues on the conference registration – I’ve gotten stuck on a bit of code and have been asking for help.  Made some progress today and hope to have this settled tomorrow so that we can begin registering people.  The problem has to do with the interaction between the Perl scripting language and a MySQL database.  I tested out Ustream, which integrates with Ning (UnionBook) as a way of doing video podcasts for the conference, but while it worked, the advertising was incredibly annoying, so I’ll be trying out different software instead.  Had a long Skype conference call with the Solidarity Center about the participation of Middle East and North African trade unionists at our event.

Fundraising: As the USA was lagging far behind other countries, I wrote to some of our friends in the American labour movement and have gotten some positive responses.  The total raised so far (including some money which has been pledged but not yet received) is £15,341 — a nearly 40% increase over last year.

UnionBook: I wrote to all UB members telling them how things were going with our drive to recruit new members – trying to reach a goal of 5,000 by 4 September.  While the site is growing, it’s not growing fast enough to meet that goal.  18 new members joined today, and another 18 yesterday.

Including four pledges by unions in the UK and Australia, we’re now just over £13,000 — which is £1,500 more than we raised in 2010.  Let’s keep up the momentum!  Here are the breakdowns by country:

• Australia – £5,791
• Canada – £3,119
• UK – £2,007
• Other – £1,104
• USA – £525
• Germany – £180
• Ireland – £154
• New Zealand – £121

The last few days have seen some substantial donations come in.  The total currently stands at  £6,992.

As a result, here are the new breakdowns by country:

• Canada £3,056
• UK £1,507
• Other £954 (£854 from the Education International)
• Australia £497 (an additional £2,616 pledged and invoiced)
• USA £523
• Germany £180
• Ireland £154
• New Zealand £121

Last year we took in £11,500 – so we need to raise at least £2,000 more to beat that.

We’ve had 76 donations from 9 countries totalling £2,295.75.

This is slightly more money than we raised last year by this stage in the appeal – but fewer donors (last year we had 98 donors by this point).

The average donation this year is £30.61, which is considerably higher than where we stood last year at this point.

Here is the breakdown of donations by country (in pounds sterling):

• UK £897.00
• USA £442.95
• Australia £425.96
• Canada £280.67
• Germany £179.54
• Other £69.63 (Belgium, Korea, Spain, Taiwan)

Labour Video of the Year: 540 votes have been cast in the last 48 hours, averaging 270 votes cast per day. Last year, we got about 3,000 votes cast. So this year with another 26 days to go, we basically need 100 votes a day to reach the same number of people. You can watch the results in real time here.

May Day appeal: I’ve now written to all correspondents asking for their help to get their unions to donate. So far, the appeal has raised just under £2,000 (US$3,308). This is slightly more than we raised last year by this point.

Global Solidarity Conference: In another week from today, I’m off to Istanbul for a second meeting with the organizing committee. I’ll have a full report when I’m back.

Our campaigns: I continue to update this page – we’re now covered through July 2006, nearly five years. In that time, we ran 124 campaigns (an average of around 25 campaigns each year). Of those, 16 were very large campaigns (by our standards), with more than 5,000 messages sent out in English alone. Of those campaigns, there were one each from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, Korea, Mexico and Zimbabwe. Two were Turkish campaigns. And nearly half of them – 7 campaigns – were focussed on workers in Iran.

Today we begin our annual May Day fundraising appeal.  I’ve created a new set of web pages for this purpose, here and am about to begin publicity.

Last year we did very well from 1 May right up until our conference (raising money for both).  Last year we raised over £6,500 in May alone – let’s see if we can beat this now.

I learned about PledgeBank at the recent NetRoots conference hosted by the British TUC in London.  Does anything think it would be a good idea to use this to promote LabourStart – and not only to fund us?  Looking forward to reading your comments.  (Please spend a few moments on PledgeBank first to get an idea of how it works.)

Following up on our 1 November appeal to readers, we’ve had some terrific responses both from individuals and unions.

• The Norwegian union Industri Energi has agreed to donate £5,000
• The International Metalworkers Federation has donated £1,257
• The Finnish national trade union centre SAK is donating £850
• UnionJobs.com in the USA donated £500

Individual donors gave several thousand pounds — I’ll produce a report on this in the coming days.

Please encourage you local and national union to donate as well.  Thanks.