Inside LabourStart

Campaigns: In the last 2 weeks we launched two new ones — in support of striking railway workers in Korea, and jailed oil workers in Kazakhstan.  Both are exceptionally important — these are dramatic struggles where workers are up against the power of the state, and I hope everyone will do their bit to make these campaigns among our biggest ever.  We’ll be launching a followup campaign next week for the Crown Holdings workers in Canada.  I hope after that we’ll be able to take a short break before the new year — to catch our collective breath …

Mailing lists: Due to an extraordinary effort by the Korean teachers’ union to build support in the country for their campaign, we picked up several hundred Koreans for our mailing list.  As a result, Korean has gone from being our 21st largest list to being the 11th largest, with 714 subscribers (this was just 173 a month ago).

Berlin 2014: Two weeks ago I reported that we had 128 people signed up for the conference; today that number is 197.  The largest groups are from Germany (44), the UK (24), Pakistan (15), Liberia (12) and Nigeria (11).  I’m still not certain that the comrades from Pakistan, Liberia and Nigeria and some other countries have fully understood that LabourStart is not covering airfares, although it’s possible that some of them will be in Berlin for the ITUC.  The registration form is now available in Russian as well as English and German; we expect that a Dutch version is on the way.  Tom and Edd developed a comprehensive strategy for promoting the conference to a UK audience, so we should see the size of the UK contingent grow.  Meanwhile, I’ve focussed some attention on building participation from Finland, Denmark, Israel, the Czech Republic and Poland, with more countries coming soon.

Books: We’re about to begin work on book 4 — a collection of essays by former IUF General Secretary Dan Gallin.  Sales of the earlier books and calendar remain sluggish.

Campaigns: We launched another campaign today, in support of locked out workers in the USA.  Meanwhile, our Sri Lanka campaign is doing well, with well over 8,000 messages sent — a significant number of them from Australia.  Our volunteer translators have been working very hard on the many campaigns we’ve had in the last few weeks.  We expect to very soon have another campaign in support of Korean railway workers — now being reviewed by the ITF and ITUC.  And we’ve just learned today that the 3 Cosas campaign here in London has been victorious.  They had a LabourStart campaign that was UK-only during the summer.

Berlin 2014: The organizing committee in Berlin continues to meet regularly and a draft agenda is shaping up very nicely. Last week I reported that 40 people had registered so far; today that number is 128, with the largest groups coming from the UK (19) and Germany (19).  If you’ve not yet registered, please do so today.

Publications: Sales of our calendar have started to pick up — in part due to publicity we did today.   (Free shipping helps.)  This afternoon so far we’ve sold 6 of them to 6 separate individuals.  So the total so far is 197 — but I have every hope that we’ll be over 200 tomorrow and sales will continue to rise as we approach Christmas.

Upcoming meetings: Tom is attending the Unions 21 conference in London tomorrow.  I’ll be speaking next Friday in Freiburg, Germany at an academic conference on “Mobility and Civil Society: How social commitment takes place.”  Among other things, it will be an opportunity to meet German students and talk up our conference.

Articles: I submitted a piece to the ITUC’s online magazine Equal Times about the trade union movement in Georgia; it should appear next week.

This blog: I fixed a problem we were having with the new subscription module.  If you’re getting this as an email, this means it all works.

Six months before our Global Solidarity Conference opens in Berlin, and just one day after the first mass mailing to our English list, we’re already up to 112 registrants from 39 countries. It’s just above 39% female, which is below our goal of 50%.

This is something that never happened with previous conferences, so this looks to be a very big one. 

Some of the registrants, unfortunately, are ignoring or have misunderstood our message — which I tried to make clear — that LabourStart is not paying anyone’s airfare.  Still, the vast majority of those who registered are clearly planning on attending.

The largest groups come from Germany (21) and the UK (17).

We haven’t even done our mass mailing to our German list yet — and we have 3,855 people on the German list — quite of few of whom, we hope, will attend.

I’ve not been updating this regularly enough, but a lot’s been going on over the last 24 days.

Berlin 2014: I just returned from a short visit to Berlin where I met our organizing committee.  The conference opens in a little more than 6 months and so far we’ve got a venue (Ver.di headquarters), an organizing committee, a registration form and a blog full of information — so far, so food.  Please make sure to register if you plan to come.

Kiev 2013: We had a very successful meeting of LabourStart correspondents (and potential correspondents), and our first ever rock concert last week.  See details below.  Followup has included the translation of additional pages into Russian, and signing up some new correspondents.

Firefox OS book: This was published on 24 October; sales so far have not been as high as expected, but we have sold over 140 of them.  If you’ve read the book, please make sure to post reviews to Amazon.  If you don’t have the book, please order a copy now.

The LabourStart Calendar 2014: We need to work harder to promote sales.  We sold 164 last time I reported to you, and in the last 24 days — just 11 more.  Please do what you can to promote this.

Intern: We have hired Tom Harris, who began work 8 days ago.  Edd continues to work with us one day a week.

Campaigns: Last time I reported, we were at 10,100 messages for our most recent campaign (Colombia); in the last 24 days we’ve picked up about 800 more.  We closed our Peru campaign.

Donations: We’ve received substantial donations from the FDHT in Geneva and the RMT union in London.

Upcoming travel: In December, I’ve been invited to speak about online campaigning at a conference in Freiburg, Germany.  In January, Tom and I will go to Berlin for another meeting with the conference organizers.  At the end of that month, I’ll be in Brussels to help the European Trade Union Institute plan a course — initiated by the German national trade union center DGB — on the subject of unions and the net.

Our next global solidarity conference is only 191 days away (or something like that).

But you can learn more — and register to attend — here: http://www.labourstart.org/2014

Book 3: Now completed, published, and waiting for the first paper copy to arrive before we officially announce it.  A draft web page is already live — http://www.labourstart.org/firefoxos — and will be improved before launch, probably tomorrow.

Intern: We have a shortlist of five intern candidates and will interview them this Friday.

Berlin 2014: I’ll be visiting Berlin next week, meeting with our organizing committee there plus others.  We should be able to launch the conference website by then, and begin online registrations.

This is how you promote LabourStart: See below for the table Derek set up at the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) convention where he’s been selling our calendars and books and making great connections for LabourStart.

Colombia campaign: After just 8 days, this is our second largest campaign ever, with just over 10,100 messages sent — over 100 of them from Colombia.

Calendar sales: Continue to be disappointing, but growing slowly.  In October, we sold just 30 copies of the calendar; in September, we sold more than four times that number — 134 copies.  I continue with weekly reminders via social media, and we mentioned it in a recent mass mailing.  We’ll continue with this in the hope that as 2014 approaches, people will begin to buy their calendars …

Blog action day: I used this to help promote some of our campaigns — but there’s no evidence it helped at all.

Donations: We received once again a large donation from LO Norway.

Newswires: I checked to see if there was a problem with one of our French newswires — there wasn’t, and with one of our Finnish newswire — there was, and I’ve not yet been able to solve the problem.

Campaigns: We launched two new campaigns – in support of striking workers at Crown Holdings in Toronto, and in support of the Korean teachers’ and public service unions, threatened with deregistration by their government.  The former is up to over 7,300 messages sent, and the latter, after just a couple of days, is already up to just under 6,800.  Following the release of jailed Canadian trade unionist John Greyson in Egypt, we were able to close down the campaign.  We also used one of our mass mailings to promote the IUF’s campaign in support of jailed independent trade unionists in China.  The UN workers campaign, with nearly 14,000 messages sent, is our largest current campaign, and one of the largest we’ve ever done.

Calendar and Book Sales:  In its first month, our LabourStart wall calendar for 2014 has sold 144 copies, an average of about five per day.  I did another push this week which generated only two new sales in two days.  Book sales totalled 1,664 as of earlier this week — with 959 of those being the campaigning book in English.

Book 3: Jeremy Green and I have completed a first draft of our book on Firefox OS for Activists.  We’re making some final tweaks today and tomorrow and hope to have it ready on Monday.

Public events: I spoke at the European Trade Union Institute seminar in Brussels on lobbying the institutions of the EU last week; the ETUI purchased 30 copies of our campaigning book.  Last Saturday, I spoke to nearly 100 activists from UNISON Wales in Cardiff, and sold all 10 campaigning books I brought with me.

Berlin 2014: While in Brussels, I had a chance to meet up with ITUC staff to discuss coordinating our efforts.  In Berlin, meanwhile, we’ve set up a meeting at the Friedrich Ebert foundation for the day I arrive, later this month.

Fundraising: I did the quarterly appeal to our power users, and the mailing this time reached 20,164.  Ten days into the previous appeal, in July, we’d raised only £1,843.72.  This time, we’ve raised £3,191.93 in the same period — a gain of 73%.

Intern: We received about 40 applications for our internship; we’re completing the shortlist today and tomorrow and will do interviews within two weeks.

Calendar: Sale of our LabourStart Calendar for 2014 have stalled — we only sold 18 in the last 6 days (of those, 8 were in Canada, 5 in Australia, 3 in the UK and 2 in the USA).  I’ve already done two rounds of publicity and today will be mailing to nearly 500 state federations of labor and central labor councils in the USA in an attempt to boost sales there.

Campaigns:

• August was an exceptionally slow month for us, so 5 days ago I wrote to all our campaign partners — GUFs and others — asking if anyone needed help.  We got answers from a number of them an expect to launch several new campaigns in the next couple of weeks.
• Edd and I met with a leader of the UN staff union and they have been facing a brutal attack on workers’ rights from the Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, and will probably be needing a campaign from us in the next few days.
• We closed down the Philippines campaign one month early (see below) and the GE Erie campaign one month late (at the request of the union).
• We did a special mailing to our Canadian subscribers boosting a number of campaigns there (not all of these were hosted by LabourStart).

Intern: As I reported below, Edd is leaving us at the end of this month (though will continue working one day a week for LabourStart) and we’ve begun the process of recruiting a replacement.

News:

• The biggest improvement, described below, is that now you can get beyond the first 50 news stories on any of our country pages.   (This will soon work on our home pages in the different languages as well.)
• I’ve also fixed a problem with links to the country names that were appearing on the home page in English — the first time the name appeared, the link would take you to our new, correct country news page, but the second appearance of the country name still took you to an old page.
• With so much coverage of the British TUC conference last week, we did a special mailing to our UK list promoting the news page.  It’s very important that we continue to draw attention to our news service, as many of the people on our mailing list are familiar with our campaigns — but not with the news we provide.

Correspondents: 

• As reported below, a correspondent can now change their default language and country — either temporarily or permanently.  This caused a small problem for senior correspondents, as Derek discovered, but this has now been fixed.
• We’ve been struggling to make sure that we have current email addresses for all the correspondents and Edd has nearly completed this task.
• This week, I resumed weekly mailings to correspondents and I intend to keep doing this.

Internationalization:

• Our failure to sustain LabourStart news in any Nordic language except Norwegian has been with us for some time.  This week, I wrote to all our subscribers on the English list from Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden and have received responses from 10 of them — at least one has volunteered to be a correspondent, others have already contact their national trade union centres in the hope of growing interest in LabourStart.
• Our French home page was the last one to be converted to our new format and this is now complete.

Kiev 2013: There will be a meeting of LabourStart correspondents from Russia, Ukraine and Georgia (and other countries?) in Kiev at the beginning of November.  Masha has drafted an invitation letter which I’ve read and approved, and Edd has found email addresses for all our correspondents from the region who have been invited.  I will be attending myself.

Berlin 2014: I’ve fixed a meeting at the ITUC in Brussels for two weeks from today to discuss how our conference ties in with theirs.  They’ve been exceptionally cooperative and this is hugely important for the success of our global solidarity conference.

Small screen version of LabourStart: Edd’s been working on a version of the site that will automatically appear when you view it on a smartphone, as we’ve done with campaigns.  This is nearly ready.

Daily tech tips for trade unionists: I  wrote ten of these which appeared over the last couple of weeks and got some nice and interesting feedback.  Would be interested to know if comrades would like this to continue.  Meanwhile, I’m pausing the effort.

Calendar: Our first-ever wall calendar has appeared and it’s beautiful.  So far this week, we’ve sold 97 of them.  Have you ordered yours yet?

Campaigns:  Our campaign demanding the release of jailed Canadian John Greyson, held by the Egyptian police, went global and was publicized in a mailing.  It’s now up to 3,845 messages sent. Tomorrow we’re meeting with an activist from the UN staff unions, here to discuss efforts to weaken trade unions for staff at the global body — a possible campaign.

Berlin 2014: Last weekend I was able to meet with another member of the Berlin committee and discuss many of the issues around our upcoming conference.  I booked flights for my visit to Berlin next month where I’ll meet the whole committee and help take planning forward.

Photo of the day: I made changes in how we do the photo of the day feature on the front page of LabourStart in part to deal with problems that came up with our use of CloudFlare to cache our site.  But it’s also allowed us to do two things we hadn’t planned on — to pre-load a photo for a date in the future, and to show an archive of all photos we’ve had recently.

Correspondents: Every correspondent is given a default language and country, and while this is usually good enough, sometimes it needs to change.  Correspondents themselves now have the ability to do this after they’ve logged in.

Coverage of the British TUC congress: Thanks to Edd and others we have very impressive coverage of this and today will be doing a mailing to our UK list (over 10,000 addresses) to spread the word about this.

Our next book: We’re still writing the book and hope to have it ready in a few more days.  It’s hard to keep pace with the ever-changing world of mobile phones, but I think it will be a very interesting book.

Daily tech tips for trade unionists: A series I started on my blog which may be of interest to LabourStart correspondents.  Click here to see the first few.  Please feel free to add comments and make suggestions.

August is traditionally a quiet time and I was away for most of the month. Nevertheless, we’ve made progress on a number of fronts.

Campaigns: We’ve won a great victory at the Toronto Plaza hotel and were praised by the United Steelworkers for the work we did. Another of our previously Canada-only campaigns has gone live — we’re supporting the union demand to released jailed Canadian film-maker and union activist John Greyson, who is being held in Egypt.

Berlin 2014: We’ve announced the date and are slowly informing people about it. We’re not rushing this out just yet as some people will be wanting to get invitation letters to apply for visas to Germany and we’re not yet ready for (we’ll want a partner union there first). The committee in Berlin has already met a couple of times. I’m planning a first visit to Berlin in late October. I with spoke with ITUC staffers who are in charge of their congress and ours will follow immediately after theirs. It looks like we already have a venue for our event, which is great as still have about 8 months to go. One of the members of our Berlin committee is visiting London and we’ll meet on Saturday.

Twitter: We reached a milestone of 10,000 followers on 26 August. Twitter cards now working (see the explanation below).

Books: We have a new publications page advertising all our books and sales are probably just over 1,500 in the first 8 months. We’re working to finish the third book in the next few days, and are discussing one more for later this year and some options for next year. CreateSpace is still not being great about payments, but we hope to have this sorted out very soon.

Calendar: The LabourStart Calendar for 2014 is now done — we’ve ordered one copy to have a look at it before we go public with it. It’s a beautiful design and kudos to Edd for all the work he put into it.

Photo of the day: There’s a brand-new feature — we’ll now be able to pre-load photos for future dates, and to archive the ones we’ve run.  Derek is currently testing.

Internationalization: The Italian and Portuguese editions have been revived. We expect to spend quite a bit of time on building up the Portuguese edition and have secured some pledges of funding for this. The translators’ mailing list is now considerably larger with all languages covered and our campaigns are now routinely appearing in a large number of languages, with mailing lists growing as well.

News database: When correspondents login now, they can see their default country and language and the next step is to allow them to change these whenever they want. So if you regularly post news about, say, Canada, but suddenly have a lot of news stories from the USA, you will be able to change your default country on a temporary basis.

Travel: The next two months will see me travelling to speak at a number of trade union events. These includes separate trips to Geneva, Brussels, Cardiff, Berlin, and Kiev.