Inside LabourStart

Since last Wednesday we’ve had a very busy week …

Chile: We’ve had full coverage of the strike at the world’s largest copper mine, and have publicised that fact across social media.

Egypt: We’ll be exploring the possibility of new campaign with our friends at the CTUWS.

Europe: We’ve continued running with the Fedex/TNT campaign for at least another month, at the request of the ETF.

Hungary: We expect to shortly launch a campaign in support of workers who’ve been forbidden to strike – at the request of the European Transport Workers’ Federation.

Kazakhstan: We closed the campaign in all languages, but may need to do another as the issues have not been resolved.

Malawi: We added a new correspondent from the journalists’ union.

Romania: Our mailing list in Romanian grew by several hundred due to the campaign we’re running in support of Bucharest metro workers.

Sweden: We’ve responded favourably to the request for a campaign and are expecting something quite soon.

Adding news: We’ve cleaned up the pages where correspondents add news, dropping a lot of extraneous material.

Book of the month: We’ve started promoting a book of the month — on our home page, across social media and soon, in a mailing. The authors of ‘Dying for an iPhone‘ are delighted.

Campaigns: We’ve shared a piece Derek wrote — Ten Reasons Why Unions Should Use LabourStart for Online Campaigns — on our home page.

Country news: Our country news page was not rendering correctly on small screens (like smartphones); this has now been fixed.

Donations: We followed up with appeals to several global unions, and BWI committed to a donation again this year.

Internationalisation: Our Hebrew home page had many problems, with far too much English and texts aligning on the wrong side of the page — all of this now fixed this week, as we move to other languages one by one.

LabourStart Jobs: We continue to make progress on this — it’s now multilingual and we’ve two designs for logos, and have registered the domain name labourstartjobs.org. Still working on this.

Today in Labour History: We had problems with character encoding which were screwing up the display of non-English texts — now fixed, as you can see on our home page.

We’re back to weekly updates.

Europe: We’ve asked again to close the Fedex/TNT campaign, which has been running for more than five months and we expect to do so later this week. We don’t know yet what the effect of the campaign has been.

Jordan: At the request of the Education International, we have now closed this campaign — our largest of 2021 with 9,643 supporters. The EI told us: “The outcome was great with the release of the vice President of the Jordanian Teachers Association (JTA) Dr. Nasser Al-Nawasra, declared innocent by the appeal court in Amman last Sunday 11 July as shared previously … We will keep pressure on the Jordanian government in order to reinstate the union.”

Kazakhstan: Our long-running Kazakhstan campaign is also closing this week, though we haven’t yet had the result we wanted.

Ukraine: After ten months, and with no results reported to us, we suspend the Ukraine miners’ campaign.

Fundraising: We did some followup work the European federations two of which have already made generous donations this year – and we expect more.  We continue to receive generous donations from Canadian unions, both national and local.

Interns: It’s looking increasingly likely that we will have one or more student interns from Canada, starting in September.

LabourStart Jobs: Expect more news about this in the coming days – for now, correspondents should note that there’s an option to tag stories which advertise jobs in the labour movement as such. We’ve always posted such stories, but have never collected them in one place, nor made it this easy to tag them.

This long-delayed report covers quite a bit of time — more than ten weeks. And it’s been a very busy ten weeks at that. This will be concise, but from next week I hope to resume regular weekly updates which can feature some more details. So here, basically, are the headlines since 10 May …

Campaigns: We launched quite a few, and even won some. These included campaigns in support of tobacco workers in the USA (in partnership with FLOC and the IUF), Thailand (with IndustriALL), Metro workers in Bucharest, Romania (with ETF and EPSU), Brazil, Colombia, and more. We also closed campaigns in Albania, India, Israel, Algeria and Ukraine. The last two were victories — our brother Mourad in Algeria was released from jail, and Profbud reached agreement with the employer in Ukraine. We’ve also had a partial win in Turkey, as Cihan has been released from jail but ordered to remain in the country to stand trial (that campaign continues).

Webinars: We held two excellent webinars in June, with several hundred participants. These focussed on Colombia and Brazil, and were closely tied to campaigns we launched in support of workers in both countries. Both the webinars and the campaigns have helped to raise the profile of our work in Latin America. We also reached out to the RWDSU in the USA to get a webinar going around the Amazon organising effort, but that seems to have stalled.

Publications: Dan Gallin’s new book Resistance was published and we’ve promoted it widely, including a limited time offer of free versions on Kindle. We have begun work on a 2022 Global Labour Calendar, our first in many years. We have also been working on a long-overdue edition of our Campaigning Online and Winning book.

Interns: The intern we were expecting to begin employing in mid-June was not available to us. Meanwhile, we are working on getting one or more interns from Canadian universities.

Fundraising: We did our annual appeal in mid-June, followed up by mailings about the release of Mourad and Cihan. We also did our first Facebook fundraiser, meeting our target this week. We’ve received generous donations in the last couple of months from IndustriALL, EPSU and ETF, and have reached out to other global unions and European federations. In addition, we have had tremendous support from a number of Canadian unions.

Outreach: We were approached by a team of academics in Canada who are doing “a research project which focuses on technology-driven innovation for the labour movement”. Eric had a two-hour interview with them, and Derek will soon be invited as well.

Fixes and changes to LabourStart: We are always making small changes, but in recent days have begun to attack a very long to-do list of suggested changes. We have now sorted out the country news pages for countries which have changed their names so that you will automatically see a link to the alternate name (e.g., Burma / Myanmar) — for the moment, this works only in English. We also fixed a problem with tweeting campaigns not in English and this seems to be working.

Blue skies: One project just beginning will be the tagging of news stories if these concern jobs in the labour movement. We often have such stories and we will find a way to show them in one place for people looking for such jobs — at no cost to the unions.

May Day: We’ve announced our event – an online meeting in support of jailed trade unionists in Hong Kong, Myanmar, Belarus, Turkey and Iran.  We’re invited the speakers and created a signup form for participants.  At the moment, 720 people have visited the registration page, and 257 have signed up to participate in the event — after less than one day of publicity.

Books: We’re in the final stages before the launch of Dan Gallin’s book, Resistance. Details soon.

New correspondents: We added new correspondents from the USA, Vanuatu, the UK, Canada, Italy, Nigeria and Malaysia.

Jordan: We asked the Education International if it’s possible to close down this campaign, which has now been running for more than 3 months.

Malaysia: We are about to launch a campaign, at the request of BWI.

Donations: We received another generous donation from a union in Norway.

FAQ: We had an old page on the site with old information — this has now been updated.

Home page: We fixed a problem – if there was a second country for the news story for a top story, it wasn’t appearing.

We spoke too soon – in Kyrgyzstan, the government has had a change of heart and has passed anti-union laws. We are just about to launch a campaign demanding that the president veto that law.

In other news …

Canada: We’ve done a mailing to our entire global list encouraging submissions to CLIFF, the labour film festival. We received a very generous donation from a Canadian union. And we also launched a new Canada-only campaign.

Israel: We continued with building our mailing list and social media following, writing directly to the more than 500 Hebrew speakers who supported our campaign – which now has just under 7,500 supporters.

Myanmar: We have given extensive publicity to two union fundraisers, organised by DSA in the US, and BWI.

Pakistan: We did more followup mailings to promote our campaign, also to our English, German and French lists.  The campaign has over 7,000 supporters.

Home page: A problem emerged with the ‘more stories’ for country link not working; this has now been fixed.

Interns: We participated in Cornell University’s Social Justice Career Fair and interviewed a number of participants. Three of these were short-listed, they were interviewed, and we took a decision to hire one, who will begin work in June. Our intern Amos, who is studying at the Global Labour University in Berlin, completed his internship with us.

Labour News Network: We have revived this tool which allows LabourStart correspondents to post news stories that have not appeared elsewhere on the web. This is now being beta-tested. More details coming soon.

Mailing list: We added 366 new subscribers from the new campaign supporters, mostly to the English list but also with significant growth for the Dutch list.

May Day: We are working on two events online — a panel discussion focussing on jailed trade union activists around the world, and a possible world premiere online of a major new film about working people (more details soon).

RSS newswires: We have been alerted to the fact that these are broken; we will aim to fix them ASAP.

The top news for us this month was the victories we had in two of our current campaigns — in Kyrgyzstan and Algeria. In the former, the government has withdrawn proposed changes to the labour laws. In the latter, the two women union activists who were jailed have been released. We spread the news of these two wonderful victories widely.

Myanmar: We are in discussions with global unions about a possible campaign.

Norway: We’ve received several generous donations from Norwegian unions this month.

Pakistan: We launched a campaign against union-busting at Metro A.G. in Pakistan, sponsored by UNI Commerce. This campaign features many new languages for us, including Urdu. As of today, it has 5,420 supporters.

Thailand: We have a new volunteer translator for Thai.

USA: We reached out to offer our help to the union organising Amazon workers in the USA.

Correspondents: We held the second correspondents’ meeting on Zoom.

Deliveroo workers: At the request of the ITF, we shared links to their online global campaign to support unionisation at Deliveroo.

International Women’s Day: We posted a lot of news stories, and wrote to all correspondents to encourage them to do so as well, and posted across social media.

Interns: We participated in Cornell University’s career fair for students interested in social justice, speaking with about a half dozen students in individual, short interviews. We will almost certainly hire one of them.

Labour News Network: Work is nearly complete on this project — it will allow correspondents to post news stories which do not currently appear anywhere else on the web. This issue was raised during one of our recent Zoom meetings with the LabourStart community of correspondents and translators.

Jordan teachers campaign: This is now our largest current campaign, with over 8,500 supporters this morning. The campaign appears in a record 20 languages with several more on the way. This is more than 1,000 more than our second largest campaign. If we continue to work on this, this may be our first campaign in a long time to reach 10,000 supporters.

Our mailing lists continue to grow thanks to new campaign supporters signing up. In the last three weeks, we gained 843 new subscribers, most of them for the English list.

Reviving dormant languages: We’ve had some success in the last few weeks getting our campaigns and mailings translated into languages for which we did not have regular translations in recent years. These include Vietnamese, Arabic, Korean, Georgian, and Polish.

Donations: We received generous donations this month from IUF and PSI.

Since our last update 19 days ago, here’s what we’ve been up to:

Campaigns – Belarus: We launched a new campaign on Friday, 13 November, in support of more than 40 jailed union activists. By today, the campaign had about 6,000 supporters. Just before we got news of the arrests, we were sharing widely the video of 4 of the union leaders thanking us for our earlier campaign – and then they were arrested again.

Campaigns – Colombia: We launched a new campaign on Monday, 2 November in support of teachers facing death threats. Today it has just under 7,000 supporters.

Campaigns – Jordan: We closed down the campaign in support of the Jordanian teachers. The unionists were released, but the repression continues. We may well need to do more campaigns on this in future.

Campaigns – Upcoming: We are still expecting campaigns (which have been proposed to us) from Brazil and Israel.

Mailing list: We added 511 new subscribers from supporters of our campaigns (who requested to be added to our lists).

Webinars: We’re going to begin a series of webinars, starting in December, and are in discussions with an American union about the first one. We’ve purchased a license to use Zoom in this way, allowing up to 500 people at a time to participate in our events.

CLIFF: We sponsored a special award at the Canadian Labour International Film Festival this year — the LabourStart Award for Working Class Solidarity. This award recognises the festival film that speaks the most to building worker-to-worker global solidarity. There are two recipients of the award in 2020: Birth of a Union and Filadelphia.

• Birth of a Union is a 19.5 minute documentary from the United States and Director Josh Karan. The film chronicles the historic effort to organize low wage workers in North Carolina, where it is illegal for any State agency to agree to a Union contract.
• Filadelphia is a 7 minute documentary from Brazil and Director Dani Drumond. The film reveals the work and voices of 16 women in a recycling sorting cooperative. As they work and talk, a subject inevitably comes up: why do men give up so early on work in the cooperative?

Interns: The Global Labour University is once again offering us short-term internships in early 2021. We had a successful internship at GLU in early 2020 and look forward to continue this relationship.

Donations: We received generous donations from, among others, the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), the Human Rights at Work Foundation (FDHT), and the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) in the UK. We also publicised a link to an album created by David Thorpe, a UK singer-songwriter, who is generously donating 30% of the proceeds to LabourStart.

Technical glitch: Our website was briefly offline as our Internet host, IONOS, made us change some details on their domain name server. We did, however, quickly recover.

We last updated this blog two weeks ago — and what a fortnight it has been!

CAMPAIGNS:

We launched a new campaign demanding the release of jailed trade unionists in Belarus; after just six days online it is already our 5th largest active campaign (out of 9) and could easily grow into our largest. In addition to all the usual publicity, I wrote about it in my weekly column for Solidarity, which was shared widely.

Jailed trade unionists in Belarus.

Soon we’ll do followups after a week online and this should give it a big boost; our recent Myanmar campaign grew by about 25% thanks to that second wave of publicity, so this will almost certainly result in the campaign reaching 7,000 supporters, if not many more.

We now have 9 live campaigns, and here they are listed in order of the number of supporters and including the date they were launched:

1 Belarus: Stop the violence – defend democracy and human rights – 21-Aug-2020 – 7412
2 Myanmar: Stop union-busting at sporting goods company – 14-Oct-2020 – 7033
3 Colombia: Support miners striking against the ‘death shift’ at Cerrejón – 01-Oct-2020 – 6733
4 Albania: Solidarity with the miners – end repression now – 12-Dec-2019 – 6544
5 Belarus: Free union leaders and activists – 23-Oct-2020 – 5862
6 Jordan: Release leaders of the Jordanian Teacher Association – 10-Aug-2020 – 5838
7 Cambodia: Free jailed union leaders now – 24-Aug-2020 – 5729
8 India: Workers’ rights under attack – 13-Jun-2020 – 5678
9 Ukraine: Support miners in their fight for decent conditions – 18-Sep-2020 – 5346

We have another campaign in the pipeline from Israel, involving young workers and a major transnational company.

To help raise awareness of how successful we are with these campaigns, we’ve been sharing the translated PDFs of our campaign victories across social media, showing a new language every other day.

MAILING LISTS:

Our lists grew significantly in the last two weeks, as we added 822 new subscribers, mostly to the English list. (If we continue at this pace, we’ll pick up 21,000 new subscribers in the next year.) We also added 239 new subscribers to our Belarusian list yesterday, which previously had just 18 subscribers.

In an effort to raise awareness of our new campaigns in Punjabi (every campaign is now translated into that language, which is spoken by 125 million people), we did a mailing to 1,400 people from India and Pakistan on our English mailing list — and invited their help to translate our campaigns into other languages in that region.

FUNDRAISING:

We completed a 4-week campaign to sell our “Workers’ Rights are Human Rights” union-made t-shirts and increased sales from 130 to 230 by the time the campaign ended. The company which is producing the t-shirts (CustomInk) has already paid us our share, including many individual donations over and above the cost of the shirts.

People should begin receiving their shirts in the next 10 days and we wrote to everyone who ordered, suggesting that people post photos of themselves in the shirts on social media, which we can then share.

Our best-selling LabourStart t-shirt.

Because of problems some people were having with PayPal — and a reluctance by some to use PayPal on principle — we’ve added an alternative way to donate to LabourStart (Transferwise) to our donations page, and have suggested it to some individuals. We’ll mention this the next time we try to raise money. Transferwise allows easy international bank transfers as well as credit and debit card payments, with no need to sign up for an account.

We received generous donations from CUPE in Canada and the Education International, as well as pledges from both the ITUC and ETUC.

David Thorpe, a British entertainer and long-time supporter of LabourStart, has released an album with his band and is generously donating 30% of the proceeds to LabourStart. We’ll shortly be publicising this.

David Thorpe.

TELEGRAM:

Some time ago we set up a public channel on this network, which is widely used by pro-democracy protestors in Belarus, Hong Kong and Thailand. Two weeks ago, it had just 26 subscribers and we had not been posting to it. We’ve now revived it, and there are 137 subscribers now. We’ve begun posting regularly to this group — mostly events, new campaigns, and our photo of the week. We hope we can grow this by several hundred in the next few weeks.

INSTAGRAM:

This is another social network that we had not been using — but we now have an account and a page there, and already have 100 followers. Anyone who wants to help post images and texts there is invited to volunteer.

SMART SPEAKERS:

Tens of millions of people now use smart speakers (most notably Amazon echo, but there are others including Google Home and Apple’s Siri) to play music, listen to the news, etc. We now have a rudimentary LabourStart ‘skill’ which reads out (and shows on-screen) the latest top global labour news stories, updated every day. We should have a public version of this ready in the next few days.

LabourStart news – on an Amazon Echo device.

AND FROM AROUND THE WORLD …

Armenia and Azerbaijan: We’ve given extensive coverage to the international and local trade union responses to the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, and now regularly report on the region. I wrote about this in a recent column for Solidarity.

Canada: LabourStart will be sponsoring a prize in CLIFF – the labour film festival.

Georgia: We’re reached out and gotten agreement from the Georgian Trade Union Confederation to resume translating all our campaigns and mailings into Georgian. We’ve also reached out (twice) to our five inactive correspondents in Georgia, and will soon try to recruit more. We’ve also shared a document on how to do global labour solidarity conferences with the GTUC, as we consider Tbilisi as a possible venue for such a conference in late 2021.

Singapore: A local union activist reached out to us and we had a very long discussion, including ways in which LabourStart can be helpful, particularly in supporting exploited migrant workers there.

USA: We continue to reach out to unions, including the mineworkers and farmworkers, and expect to shortly hold a live event online with the latter.

Apologies for the delay in getting out this report, which covers September and the first half of October. It’s been a very busy time with many new campaigns, some defeats and one wonderful victory, a successful fundraiser and ongoing issues with our mailing lists. Here are some highlights …

Miners in Ukraine take their struggle underground.

Campaigns:

We launched a campaign in support of garment workers in Myanmar on 14 October, miners in Colombia on 1 October, and miners in Ukraine on 18 September. The Colombia campaign very quickly became our second largest live campaign.
In late September, we closed our campaign in support of nurses in Zimbabwe after winning a big victory. As PSI wrote to us, “After 3 months of industrial action, the Zimbabwe Nurses Association has called the strike off in a reciprocation of the gestures of goodwill that have been made by the new health Minister, Constantino Chiwenga.”
The Turkey (Deriteks) campaign was closed after 3 months, without a good result for the workers and the Indonesia campaign was also closed after the Omnibus bill was passed – a defeat for the workers.
We closed our Poland, Malaysia, Czech Republic and Peru campaigns, but have not yet heard back from the sponsoring unions with any details of the results.
All of our campaigns have now been translated in Punjabi for the first time. Punjabi has also been added as a language for adding news to LabourStart.
We made a minor change to our campaigns page forcing users to choose ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question of whether they want to be on our mailing list in the hope that this will boost sign-ups.
We’ve also prepared some PDFs in a number of languages highlighting several of our campaign victories in the last year and a half. These were shared in mass mailings to some of our lists.

Our best-selling LabourStart t-shirt.

Fundraising:

We had a very good fundraising drive starting on 8 September, raising over £25,000.
This included sales of over 130 t-shirts, starting on 24 September.
Our next fundraiser will take place in January.

Mailing lists:

Following some problems with Amazon (which Sendy uses to send out our messages), we have returned to use Mailchimp. We had some issues with both services, but these are now resolved with Mailchimp (though not yet with Amazon). We have noticed a significant increase in opens and clicks in Mailchimp compared to Sendy – including a 28% boost in opens for one of our lists, and we’re hopeful that this will lead to even larger campaigns.

7 October – World Day for Decent Work (WDDW):

We tagged news stories related to this, created a page modelled on the Covid-19 page, and wrote to all correspondents about this. We shared the link to this page across social media.
We also assisted the ITUC with a big promotion of their new Democracy Pledge campaign.

USA:

We now have a list of over 1,000 US trade unionists and have written to them twice. In addition, we’ve contacted leaders of the United Mine Workers to win their support for our campaigns for the miners in Belarus and Ukraine.