Inside LabourStart

New logo: We needed a generic logo to use on our social media accounts and had our graphic designer modify an existing one we used. We think the new logo actually looks pretty good.

Bluesky: Last week we reported that in our first week using the new platform we picked up over 3,000 supporters. Today, that’s nearly doubled to over 5,800 followers. We’ve shared 265 posts so far and many of them are being liked and passed on. That’s a lot more than most other Bluesky accounts belonging to global unions. Of the ones we could find, they ranged from 188 to 1,000 followers — but these numbers will certainly grow. To help them grow their followings, this week we also created our first “starter pack” on Bluesky, listing all the global and European union federations with a presence on the new platform. We publicised this widely and will be creating more such “packs”. If you want to help, get in touch.

Mailing lists: As part of an effort to allow segmentation of our lists to work, which requires that we ‘tag’ each email subscriber with their country names, we’ve been adding thousands of new subscribers and tagging many existing ones. As a result, for example, we now have a mailing list for the USA with over 13,500 subscribers. We’re doing this country by country, starting with the English-speaking ones. This will allow for much more targetted mailings.

Donations: Unions and individuals continue to respond generously to our appeal. This week NITO, the Norwegian union for engineers and technicians, told us that they honoured Thomas Seltzer and gave him a NOK 50,000 prize — which he donated in full to LabourStart.

KESK campaign: We did a lot to grow this campaign this week. It grew to 3,870 supporters and appears in 14 languages, with more coming.

Thailand campaign: This new campaign also saw growth last week and now has 3,295 followers. It appears in 11 languages with more on the way.

US elections: We’ve been posting every union statement we could find, mostly (but not only) from unions in the US.

Finances: We continue to receive generous donations from individual trade unionists as well as from their unions. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last few weeks, but we’re not there yet.

We were delighted to hear from one union in Norway which decided to give us 1 NOK for every member of the member. Another union, in Germany, with two million members, just sent out their magazine to all of them including our appeal for funds and a link.

Arthur Svensson prize: Once again we’ve done a mass mailing to our list to promote the Arthur Svensson prize for international trade union rights. We hope that it will bring in many good nominees this year.

Country pages in French: It was pointed out to us that the Canada page in French still had a lot of residual English. We have now begun the process of fixing this. We will probably need to do this for other languages as well.

CLIFF: The LabourStart Executive watched candidate films and selected two as winners. Next week we’ll be informing our lists how they can view those films online.

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.

Due to my absence on honeymoon, this report is delayed by about a week. It’s been a busy time for LabourStart.

Podcasts: We are resuming our podcasts, interviewing comrades in Belgium and Taiwan, linked to new campaigns we have launched (more below).

New campaigns: We launched a campaign in support of transport workers in Poland submitted by the European Transport Workers Federation. As Eric was absent during this period, Derek and Espen took up the slack and launched the campaign. Earlier in the month we launched a campaign in support of maritime workers in Taiwan, who are on strike. This campaign is our first in a very long time to appear in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese.  We are currently running eight (8) campaigns, which is nearly a record for us and which follows a long dry spell.  The largest of these is from India, with 4,714 supporters after less than four weeks online.

Languages: We now have a framework for campaigns in Tamil, and our first campaign running in that language.

Donations: The German education workers union GEW made a substantial donation as did the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and IndustriAll Europe.  But our financial situation remains quite difficult for now.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew this month, with the English list picking up 326 new subscribers and the Chinese list getting 119, with smaller numbers for the other lists. We also did our first mailing on Mailjet using segmentation, targetting people who have not clicked on a link in our messages.

Labour News Network: We ook another step toward revitalising this little-used part of our website — we published Espen’s report on South Sudan here.

Interns: Four of our former interns showed an interest in continuing to work with each other and with us. Next month we’ll try to organise an online meetup of all the interns we’ve had over the last 12 years.

We missed last week’s update because I was getting married.  We will probably miss next week’s too, as I’ll be on my honeymoon.  But for now, here’s a short update of the highlights from the last two weeks:

New campaign: We launched a major new campaign in support of garment workers in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.  After less than two days online, the campaign had over 3,000 supporters which is very fast growth for us.  (The fact that it is no longer August and union offices have re-opened may have helped.)  The campaign appears in eight languages — includind Indonesian and Serbian — with more in the pipeline.  We are expecting this campaign to also appear in Tamil and are awaiting translation; this will be our first campaign in that language.  We’re also hoping to get a podcast interview done for this campaign next week and are waiting to hear back from our partners.  We currently have 6 active campaigns online.

Translators: For the first time, we had an online meetup of our Translators.  About 12 came, nearly all of them active translators, and of those there were three translators for German, which had been until recently a problematic language for us (no consistent translation).  It was a very good meeting and it will not be the last time we meet as a group.

Interns: We also reached out this week to the 16 individuals who we have identified so far (there may be a few more) who have been LabourStart interns since 2012.  A couple have already responded positively and this is a very welcome development.

Finances: Finally, this week we were able to report on a worsening financial situation for LabourStart, and we reached out to our union partners as well as the more than 700 people who regularly donate.   (Our donors’ mailing list is something very new for us.)  Even though we have not yet reached out to our public mailing lists about this, this week we raised £2,430 and received pledges totalling another £1,688, so well over £4,000 in just 7 days.  But that level of donations has to continue for a little while in order to restore some stablity and to ensure that we meet our spending commitments — which was not the case in early September.

Campaigns: No new campaigns were launched this week and all campaigns are showing slow growth — probably because it’s August and many people are on holiday. I have reminded some of our campaign partners that it is very important to mobilise support in their countries for campaigns that they have requested — which unfortunately does not always happen.

Serbia: In addition to all the usual campaign stuff, I wrote my weekly column for Solidarity on this subject and shared it widely.

Mailing lists: Our lists continue to grow as campaign supporters are added. This week we picked up 129 new subscribers to the list, 70 of them for the English list.

Finances: We now have our first mailing list of donors, featuring people who donated to LabourStart in May and June this year. We will soon begin regular updates to that list.

Correspondents: All correspondents have now been invited to an online meetup on 13 August.

News: Our correspondents have posted 807 news stories in the first 8 days of August, which is extraordinary, considering that so many union websites are not updated this month. The most active correspondents this month have been Derek, Eric, Patrick, Kyle and Pat.

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.

Fundraising: Appeals have gone out to most of our lists and we are getting a good response both from individuals and some unions. According to PayPal, we have taken in £6,825.26 in the last 30 days, which is very good and most of that in the last 7 days. An additional £281.45 came in as bank transfers — we expect more, as quite a few requests for our bank details have come through, especially from Germany. In addition to raising more money, we are cutting costs. We will be migrating from MailChimp to another company, saving about 66% per month.

Interns: We have prepared a (partial) list of all our interns over the last decade or so, and will be reaching out to them. This is a group of talented, committed young people who have already worked with us and in some cases remain engaged already.

Programming:

• Another problem on our home page had been pointed out — when ‘all languages’ was selected for a country news page, it would only show the English story as the top story on the page. This has now been fixed.
• In addition, the home page in English has been tweaked to make the donation link more prominent and to remove the redundant link to our podcasts.
• We heard of a problem with the ‘today in labour history’ content which appears on the bottom of our country pages, but we cannot reproduce the problem.

Campaigns: Still no campaigns have been proposed to us. We looked into doing a campaign on Guatemala where a union leader has been killed and are waiting to hear back. This week, we also wrote to all LabourStart correspondents and translators asking for their help to find new campaigns for us.

News: In the first three weeks of June, 35 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,392 news stories — on average, 114 per day. This is an increase since last week.

Fundraising: Facing a significant fall in our bank accounts, we put out a call for donations, including a mailing to our English list. In the last few days, we raised over £2,800 and are expecting more to come in. Comrades are encouraged to ask their unions to make donations if possible.

Programming: I looked into a complaint about the language selection drop-down menus, but could not reproduce the problem. Meanwhile, our pages showing state/province news have had a bug for years — clicking on ‘More news’ would show news from the country, not the state, and the display of the page was terrible (very small font, etc.) I have now fixed this.

Podcasts: I participated in the regular weekly online meeting of the Labor Podcasting and Radio Network, a US-based group. I learned that the numbers of downloads we are seeing is actually quite good, and will grow. I also learned that often the most successful interviews are with rank-and-file activists, and these sometimes draw larger audiences than those with high-ranking union leaders.

News: In the first two weeks of June, 32 of our volunteer correspondents were active, and they posted a total of 1,503 news stories — averaging 107 stories per day.

Campaigns: We continue to have no new campaigns listed on our home page. We have reached out to a number of unions, but so far nothing.