Inside LabourStart

We’ve now done five mailings using MailChimp – 2 to our correspondents and 3 to our English language list.  I’ve only gotten one bit of feedback – someone who noticed and liked the improvement.  No complaints from anyone.

I’m in discussions with Mahesh about getting the Hindi and Bengali editions of LabourStart off the ground – hopefully soon.

I’ve been working on my presentation for the debate on Monday at Oxford on activism vs slacktivism, as well as Thursday’s talk in New Orleans at the UALE conference.

We’ve had a slow flow of nominations for the Labour Video of the Year competition – only 16 nominated so far.  I’ve sent out a reminder to our lists.

We’re also just beginning to collect pre-registrations for our global solidarity conference in Istanbul using Facebook.  At the moment we have 10 saying yes and 12 saying maybe,  for a total of 22.  I expect this to increase in the next few days as we’ve not only mentioned it in our mailings, but have just sent it out to members of all our causes on Facebook.

This is the first campaign we’re promoting using MailChimp and we’ll see if the vastly increased speed of delivery as well as improved graphics capability leads to better results.  In the first 20 minutes, all the messages were delivered to our list, 915 people opened and read them, 168 of whom supported the campaign (an astonishing 18% response rate!).  In addition to this campaign, we’re promoting BananaLink’s campaign in support of women plantation workers, telling people to save the date for our conference, and promoting our book of the month.

I’m experimenting with MailChimp for doing our larger mailings (the English language ones).

We need a system to mail out frequently and to deliver our messages within minutes and this might be the one for us.

The first mailing to test capacity was yesterday’s to our correspondents list.

Today we’ll mail something to the entire English list.

Work has begun on promoting our upcoming 2nd annual Global Solidarity Conference, to be held in Istanbul on 18-20 November 2011.

Following my meetings last week in Turkey we have set the date and venue (the headquarters of the oil workers’ union Petrol-Is).

This has now been added as an event on UnionBook and Facebook, posted as a tweet by myself and by LabourStart, posted to the wall of LabourStart’s Facebook group, mailed out as a save-the-date mailing to our correspondents, and mentioned to unions in other countries in the region (Georgia, Egypt, etc.).

Campaigns: We were asked by KMU in the Philippines to launch a campaign on behalf of Dole workers; after consulting with colleagues in the field, we agreed to do so and are now awaiting the text.  Meanwhile, we have informed the International Metalworkers Federation that we wish to close down the India Foxconn campaign after three months and are in the process of doing so — we await final instructions from them.  We publicized the IUF’s joint campaign with FLOC regarding the murder of a union organizer in Mexico.

Conference: I’ve drafted a short proposal for the conference, to be held in the fall in Istanbul.  I plan to visit to Turkey at the end of this month to meet with the organizing committee which is being formed there.

Egypt: While the Internet was down, our comrades in the CTUWS were able to phone out short messages which were then transcribed and translated in to English – and sent to us.  We’ve been publicizing our special Egypt news page throughout the week using our mailing lists, social networks, etc.

Languages: We have now been sent the text for a Hindi edition of LabourStart which we hope to launch soon.

• I had  a meeting yesterday with Shane Enright, the trade union coordinator for Amnesty International UK.  We discussed among other things Turkey and Mexico and ways we can continue to work together – including Amnesty’s involvement in the next LabourStart conference.
• Our survey now has 1,300 responses – a big gain over the last week.  I will close it down on Monday and report the results.
• I managed to dilute the size of LabourStart’s news links database.  We are supposed to be restricted to 100 MB of data, though our internet service provider has not made an issue of us going slightly above that.  Nevertheless, I now have a system in place to check once a month and to keep the size of the database under control.
• I’ve created a new newswire – soon to be publicized – in French covering the countries of the Maghreb. In the course of doing so, I found that all our regional newswires are still referencing our old database and need to be fixed.  I will do this next week.
• LabourStart was temporarily offline – even emails to labourstart.org weren’t working – very briefly last week.  Our internet service provider spotted the problem and solved it even before we complained.
• Our new campaigns are picking up support – the Turkey campaign has 1,388 supporters after one day; the Bangladesh campaign has 4,356 supporters after 8 days.

Comrades in Turkey have offered to host the LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference there this year — we are currently in discussions about exactly, when, where and what it will cost.

At Derek’s suggestion, I mailed to a number of our smaller lists to encourage people to take part in our survey of trade  union use of the net, to join our Facebook group, to join UnionBook, and to sign up as correspondents.  Here are the results after three days: Another 149 people filled in the survey; 102 more joined our group on Facebook; 39 signed up to use UnionBook; and 10 volunteered to be LabourStart correspondents.

I attended NetRoots UK last weekend – wasn’t invited to speak, and found only a handful of trade unionists among the hundreds of participants.

At a training session yesterday for activists in the ILO staff union, I showed them traffic statistics for their new website – and we found that every single visitor to the site that day came through a link on LabourStart.  Andrew Casey had posted a link to a news story on their site which was, apparently, being clicked on.

• 531 people have already answered our survey on trade union use of the net, with the number rising all the time.  You can track the results in real time here.
• The Education International has agreed for us to close down the campaign we launched 3 months ago today.  It has gotten over 2,000 responses but has had little impact on the Colombian government.
• I’ll be attending NetRoots UK tomorrow – a major conference about activist (not specifically trade union) use of the new technology, hosted by the Trades Union Congress in London.
• I’ve been invited to speak in New Orleans in March at the annual conference of UALE, the labor educators organization.
• Our Global Solidarity Conference scheduled to take place in Sydney later this year is going to have to be postponed to 2012 or later; we’re currently exploring whether we can do a 2011 conference somewhere else.
• I’ve stopped podcasting; interest levels were far too low.
• UnionBook picked up more than 20 new members in the last 24 hours and is getting interesting publicity — a great article in Spanish from a Peruvian trade unionist which you can read on the site, plus I’ve been interviewed at length by a reporter from Hurriyet, Turkey’s largest newspaper.

I’ve chased up with correspondents and translators about our new language editions (Tamil, Georgian, Ukrainian, Serbian and Hindi) none of which have gone live yet.  I’ve noted also a ‘Plan B’ in each case where we continue to get no responses from our comrades.  It’s important that all the languages we list have fresh content and we need to identify people who can help consistently with each one.

Next Friday I’m off to Istanbul to speak at a trade union conference on new media – my second visit to Turkey this year as a guest of the unions.

All our recent campaigns have now been published in Turkish thanks to a team effort lead by a new comrade, Deniz.

The front page of Turkish LabourStart now features our campaigns in that language – it used to show only the English ones.

We asked BWI for permission to shut down the Cambodian construction workers’ campaign, which is now 3 months old.  Of course we’ve asked what the result of the campaign has been so that we can report back to our readers.

I’ve begun intensifying our use of Facebook Causes and have now emailed everyone in our largest cause, the one supporting the jailed Vietnamese union activists.

The campaigns software has been fixed – now when you send off a message and see the page asking you to do more, clicking on the link to show all current campaigns takes you directly to your language (instead of to an old page that showed a bunch of flags and languages).

We launched a second Colombian campaign this week at the request of Justice for Colombia, an NGO backed by the British TUC.  JFC has promised to promote the campaign on their website and to their lists.

I wrote a followup email to the comrade who has agreed to coordinate the team of German volunteer translators as none of our recent campaigns or emailings have gone out in that language – even though we have volunteers ready to do so.

I’ve made a number of suggestions to Andrew regarding work towards our conference in Sydney which is only one year away. These include regular phone calls, a closed group on UnionBook, and following up with our correspondents in the region.

We expect to launch a Finnish version of our campaigns starting with the Nokia one (of course) but have not gotten a correctly formatted version of the file we need yet from the metal workers.

I’ve been invited to speak at two union training events in the UK in the near future on the subject of online campaigning and social networks — one is for the UCU (academics union) in Leeds; the other will be a series of events for TSSA.

I haven’t been able to update this blog for some 4 weeks and lots has happened in that time. Here are some highlights:

New campaigns: We launched three new campaigns – India: Over 500 workers jailed in dispute with Foxconn (4,036 messages sent so far), Thailand: Migrant workers have the right to workers’ compensation (1,703 messages), and Colombia: Free jailed university lecturer and trade unionist (1,707 messages). We’ve closed down one campaign last Friday — PSI’s campaign in support of jailed workers in Turkey.

LabourStart.tv: The domain registrar closed our account in late September — we’re now making efforts to get it reopened. Meanwhile, I’ve changed the link on our front page to point to http://www.labourstart.org/tv which works.

Labour and Technology podcasts: I’ve done two of these in the last month – Spammers and online communities: The challenge for trade unions (50 listeners) and Activist apps (258 listeners).

Labour photo of the year: Derek and I have agreed to begin work on this in another couple of weeks.

UnionBook: The old site has been completely shut down and unionbook.org and unionbook.org.uk now both point to the new site.

Upcoming conferences: I have been invited to speak at a conference of the International Metalworkers Federation in Geneva next week — it’s called “IMF global trade union networks in TNC’s as a tool to organising and promoting solidarity”. I’ve also been invited to Istanbul to speak at a conference on trade unions new media on 27 November.

2011 LabourStart global solidarity conference: Andrew has made some progress on this and we’ll be talking about it and beginning planning within the next few days.

Labour’s online bookstore: We’re ready to use the new version of UCS’s software, and this should be live in a day or two. We continue to promote about one book per month.  Authors and publishers continue to contact us regularly asking us to promote books.