Inside LabourStart

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.

There’s now a page on the conference website which will focus on the 20 countries either bordering on Turkey or within 1,000 km of Istanbul — we will be contacting each of those trade union movements over the next few days and weeks and will update the page accordingly.  Done today: Albania and Armenia.

The conference is now less than 6 months away.  But we haven’t gotten a lot of responses to appeal for ideas for workshops.  The plan is to have 20 of these over the course of 2 days.  So please – if you have any ideas for subjects you would like discussed, please share them!  Email ericlee@labourstart.org with your ideas.  Thanks very much.

Our conference in Istanbul opens 6 months from today. Here’s what we’ve done so far:

• Set the date and found a conference venue (Petrol Is headquarters in Istanbul)
• Setup a conference steering committee in Turkey
• Created a basic conference website
• Prepared a simple flyer for distribution at union conferences – being distributed this week at the European Trade Union Confederation’s congress in Athens
• Setup a Facebook event to which people can indicate whether they will attend (198 have so far said ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’)
• Have arranged for a live television broadcast of the entire conference
• Have begun reaching out to partners who will help us with workshops and with bringing participants
• Contacted Istanbul hotels and will shortly produce a list of 3 that conference participants can choose from

Compared to previous events like this, we’re actually doing well, I think. But it’s important not to lose momentum. The way these things work, it’s suddenly November and nothing is ready …

Here it is.

• The British magazine .net selects a website every month and has a major design company suggest a makeover. In the June 2011 issue, that site is LabourStart (I suggested it to them). The company doing the makeover suggestion is an award winning studio.
• The last 150 campaigns we ran are now listed in the Our Campaigns page.
• My meetings in Istanbul last week around our upcoming conference were successful. I was also interviewed for the new Turkish satellite TV channel IMC, which wants to broadcast the conference live. Nearly 20 people attended the conference organizing committee meeting at the headquarters of the oil workers union – which is where the conference will take place. I’ve done a very basic flyer about the conference which will be distributed at the European Trade Union Confederation congress in Athens this week.

I’ll be going to Istanbul on Thursday to meet with our Turkish partners. I have a fairly long agenda, including the following:

• Timetable for conference
• Plenaries – speakers
• Workshops – subjects, speakers
• Interpretation
• Costs and fundraising
• Hotel for foreign guests
• Evening activities – walk, cultural events
• Conference website – including Turkish version
• Registration procedure – also in Turkish
• Logo, banner
• Formation of a conference committee – other partners in Turkey

So far, 186 people have expressed an interest in attending, according to the Facebook page for the event, with 60 of them saying they will attend for sure.

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.

Two weeks ago I reported that 55 people had expressed an interest in attending our conference in November which is now just 7 months away.  That number has jumped to 138 in the last few days, with a third of them saying they do plan to attend and the rest are ‘maybes’.

I think we can breath a sigh of relief when the total number reaches the hundreds, especially when the number who say they are attending exceeds our goal.  Keeping in mind, of course, that this is NOT the official registration process which will begin later.

Back at my desk after being away for more than a week … here are some updates:

• There’s now a shortcut to our news about Wisconsin – just go to www.labourstart.org/wisconsin .  I’ve also fixed the page the displays state/provincial news; it had been showing a link to our old mailing lists.
• I’ve written to the CTUWS to ask if they want us to do a campaign opposing the Egyptian government’s plan to ban strikes.
• I spoke last week at the New Orleans conference of the UALE – on a panel on the subject of global solidarity.  My lecture notes are here.  The conference was an opportunity to do some networking and I learned a lot about Wisconsin and other issues that concern the labour movement in the US.
• We’re up to 55 people attending (or possibly attending) our conference in November.
• MailChimp suspended our account last week because one person on one of our lists claimed he never signed up.  I proved to them today that he had, so I hope that later today we will be able to resume mailings.