Inside LabourStart

Cambodia: Striking workers at NagaWorld band together to protect union leaders from further arrests.

Cambodia: We expect to shortly launch a campaign in support of jailed casino union leaders.

Iran: Our three-month-old campaign has now been closed in all languages.

Kazakhstan: Following the release of jailed union leaders, a decision was taken not to launch a LabourStart campaign at this time. However, the ITUC did issue a strong statement which we shared widely on our news pages and across social media.

Fundraising: We now have a draft letter and have reached out to a couple of global unions which donated during this quarter last year.

Interns: The Global Labour University has put us in touch with five students; we will be interviewing them all early next week.

T-shirts: We did a second round of publicity to promote the Rosa Luxemburg t-shirt, across social media. Later in the month, we’ll send out a mass mailing as well.

Kazakhstan: We are posting news and monitoring the situation in Kazakhstan; an online campaign is being considered by our partners.

Correspondents: We picked up one new correspondent in the USA and reconnected another. We hope to shortly hold our first ever (virtual) meeting of the more than 115 LabourStart correspondents in the USA.

Fundraising: Our first major donation of 2022 has arrived and its from the IUF in Geneva.

Instagram: We are renewing our work on the LabourStart page on Instagram, helped by one of our interns. If you’re on Instagram, please do follow this page and share it with others – thanks!

Interns: We are about to start interviewing possible interns who are currently studying at the Global Labour Labour University.

T-shirts: We’ve begun promoting the third working class history t-shirt of the month, this time featuring Rosa Luxemburg.

Twitter: In late December we reached our target of 30,000 followers for our global feed in English on Twitter.  This morning we were at 30,323.

Amazon: We shared a link to all LabourStart’s coverage of struggles at Amazon on Black Friday (today).

Germany: Apparently, our Twitter feed came under attack from some far-right accounts.

Jordan: One month after the launch of the campaign we asked Education International about possible next steps, including a webinar

Norway: IndustriEnergi voted at its congress to make a very generous donation to LabourStart.
We have fixed the Norwegian newswire but now need to get the word out about changes that need to be made.

Sweden: We had a very good discussion with LO about cooperation in future.

UK: We did a mailing to our UK list (about 9,600 people) in supporting of striking couriers in Sheffield.
The Union Dues podcast has been finalised and will be released next week. As it’s all about LabourStart, we’ll share it widely.

This was a relatively quiet week for us, as Eric was on holiday with family for part of the time.

Algeria: This campaign goes live and after just a day or so, had 3,200 supporters.  It currently appears in 4 languages with many more on the way.

Sweden: We began publicity for this campaign on Thursday with a mailing to the English list. As of 10:30 GMT, the campaign has 722 supporters.

Mailing lists: Grew this week by 103 names.

T-shirt of the Month: We began to publicise this wonderful new project from Working Class History and dna merch in Germany. We did extensive publicity across social media and a mass mailing, and will know results in early December. Feedback was almost entirely positive.  We expect to do publicity in German soon (dna merch is based in Germany).

Algeria: Expect a new campaign shortly — we’ve been given a heads up from IndustriALL.

Jordan: Our new campaign has taken off and already has more supporters (6,020) than our two most recent camopaigns. That’s the good news; the bad news is that a court has ruled against the union.

Nigeria: Our first campaign in the Yoruba language has now gone live and we have begun publicising it.  So far, no one has signed up to the campaign.

Sudan: We shared widely Eric’s column about the role of unions in the fight for democracy and against the military coup.

Donations: We received a very generous — and unexpected — donation from Education International.

Mailing lists: We picked up another 133 subscribers this week; this is more than triple what we added last week.

T-shirts: We’re about to embark on a join effort with DNA Merch in Germany to sell workers’ history themed t-shirts on a monthly basis.

Italy: The attack on the CGIL headquarters last week by fascist thugs dominates our home page these past few days. We have shared many news stories across social media as well, in English and Italian, and have reached out to global unions regarding a possible campaign (with no positive response so far). Eric also devoted his weekly column for Solidarity to this subject.

Iran: We now have a version of the campaign running in Farsi, thanks to IndustriALL. A followup mailing to the English list last week helped, and the campaign now has 5,308 supporters – a gain of nearly 1,000.

Puerto Rico: Together with UTIER and PSI, we’ll be hosting a live event in support of the campaign later this week. With 7,411 supporters, this is one of our largest recent campaigns.

Sweden: We now have a translation into Swedish of the campaign, which will shortly go live.

UK: We’ve been invited to appear on the ‘Union Dues‘ podcast next month.

Donations: We received a very generous donation from the nurses union in Canada, bringing our total donations this year from Canada to over $20,000.

Interns: We have two new interns from York University in Canada and will be meeting them for the first time today (on Zoom, of course).

Mailing lists: Our largest lists grew by just 81 new subscribers this week.

World Day for Decent Work: We revived our WDDW page from last year, tagged 14 news stories to appear there, and shared this widely across social media.

Hungary: At the request of ETF, we have closed the campaign down and have asked for a report.

Puerto Rico: Democratic Left, published by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will be running an article about our campaign. DSA currently has 95,000 members, so this is great publicity for a campaign that is already getting some traction, especially in Puerto Rico. Our Spanish list, already one of our largest, grew by 10% this month as a result.

Romania: We’ve asked ETF for permission to close the Bucharest Metro campaign after more than three months.

Sweden: The union has gotten back to us and wants the Zalando campaign to go live ASAP. We’ve asked for a Swedish translation first.

USA: With the agreement of FLOC, we have closed the BAT campaign.

Donations: One of our supporters in the UK recently passed away and her son wrote this week to donate £1,000 in her memory to LabourStart. This is the largest donation of this type that we have ever received.

Newswires: Problems were reported with our old newswires; I managed to fix it and am now waiting for results of tests.

Translations: Thanks to Mark, we are back on course with German translations with the last three campaigns now live. The response rate for our German list is the highest for any large mailing list, so this is particularly important.

Afghanistan: We continue to look for, and promote, news about the fate of the trade unions and workers, with several top stories — many coming from the International Federation of Journalists.

Iran: We’ll be participating in an online event on Sunday in support of striking oil workers.

Korea: We had a lot of information about the arrest of the leader of the KCTU, and publicised this across social media.

Kyrgyzstan: We shared widely the good news that following a campaign on LabourStart, the anti-worker bill was finally vetoed by the President.

Sweden: Our comrades have asked us to wait until 15 September before launching the campaign.

Thailand: We’re asked for permission to close down the campaign which has now been running for three months.

Correspondents: We signed up new correspondents in Brussels and Geneva. Our new Moroccan correspondent has been active, posting in Arabic, French and English.

Donations: We received a generous donation from UNI Global Union.

Essential for Recovery event: We did extensive publicity to support this event, which is being backed by ITUC, UNI, Solidarity Center, WIEGO and others.

Global Labour Calendar 2022: We’re continuing to collect photos and suggestions for dates to highlight. If there are dates in this list that you think should appear in the calendar, please let us know.

Jobs: We were approached by two unions who asked about how jobs are added to LabourStart and one has already signed up as a correspondent to post these. Unions are beginning to see the value in LabourStartJobs.org. Correspondents are encouraged to post jobs using the same link as we use to post news.

Egypt: Following recent developments at Lord International we have reached out again to our partners asking if the campaign we created now needs to go live.

Europe: We had a very positive online meeting with EFFAT, the European food workers’ union.

Global: We are helping publicise the ‘Essential for Recovery’ event next week which is being sponsored by ITUC, UNI Global Union, and others.

Puerto Rico: We have reached out to the electrical workers union offering help with their struggle.

Sweden: Our not-yet-launched campaign is on hold for another two weeks while we wait for the decision of the local union, who have gotten back to us.

Fundraising: UNI Global Union has made a very generous donation.

Global labour calendar: We have begun work on this, aiming to have it ready for publication by 1 October.

Internationalisation: We wrote to our Arabic correspondents from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen asking for their help to revive the page and to translate our campaigns. We did the same with our Hebrew language correspondents, two of whom have now responded favourably. We made a number of additional improvements to both the Arabic and Hebrew editions this week. We also reviewed the Farsi language edition of LabourStart and noted next steps. Other languages will follow.

Jobs: We listed another dozen jobs in the last two weeks and have done a weekly round of publicity across social media. Correspondents are encouraged to help with this as all the jobs being posted are coming from the UK and Canada for the moment.

August is quiet time for many people and even some trade unions — but not for LabourStart.

We’re responding to a number of new appeals for help which come in every day …

Afghanistan: We’re posting any comments and statements by unions which we can find, and have been sharing posts across social media as well.

Egypt: We are just about to launch a new campaign in support of workers at Lord International – details this coming week.

Europe: We have been reaching out to the various European regional organisations of the global union federations, and this coming week will have a call with another of the general secretaries.

Hungary: After a slow start, the campaign has picked up quite a bit – and currently has over 5,200 supporters. We raised the question of Hungarian support for the campaign with ETF.

Iran: A group that campaigns to release jailed trade unionists has reached out to us and we’ve scheduled a call for later this week to discuss joint actions.

Israel: We learned that the workers at 10bis, for whom we campaigned earlier this year, have won a big victory in the courts. We’re waiting for an English translation of the news to appear, and it’s already on our Hebrew language edition. In addition, we made further improvements to how our news shows in Hebrew (and other languages) on the country pages, having fixed the main home page last week.

Puerto Rico: We’ll be following up with several emails in the hope of providing some support for electricity workers there, possibly a campaign.

Sweden: We have prepared a new campaign and are waiting for the green light from the union.

Turkey: We have now closed our campaign in support of Cihan Erdal. The campaign had 7,172 supporters and appeared in 16 languages. As we wrote: “Cihan was ordered released from custody on 15 June 2021. He has to report to the police twice a week and cannot leave the country. Hearings will start again in September 2021.”

LabourStart Jobs: We did the first round of publicity for our new project — https://www.labourstartjobs.org — and will do weekly bursts – including a mailing to our subscribers, and highlighting some key jobs.

New correspondents: We added four new correspondents this week, two from the USA and one each from Morocco and the UK.

Our home page: We had a problem — the second country in a news story was rendering in the correct language on one part of the home page (the bottom) but not the other parts. This is now fixed — the country name is now correctly translated across the whole page.