Inside LabourStart

Africa: Work continues on preparing for our first-ever online meeting of correspondents. We have a tool that will allow our intern to compile a current list of all correspondents for the more than 50 African nations.  It turns out that we have 30 volunteer correspondents in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Nigeria with others scattered across the continent, and it will be good to meet them all — even if the meeting is on Zoom.

Brazil: With the agreement of PSI, we are closing down this campaign after many months.

Colombia: We have been asked to keep this campaign live for a while longer.

Jordan: We had an online meeting with the Education International to discuss next steps in this campaign. These will include online events in English and Arabic and a major effort to ramp up support for the Arabic version of the campaign.

Newswires: We have begun the process of repair, having fixed the Dutch and Norwegian newswires. Many more will be done in the coming days.

Pakistan: We have been asked to keep this campaign live for a while longer; there has apparently been some progress on the ground and the campaign is having an effect.

T-shirts: We did a second mass mailing to promote the t-shirts with Working Class History.  We’ll shortly share the results  — when we get them.

UnionDues podcast: This went live on 30 November. According to their website, it has been downloaded more than 200 times. We gave this podcast extensive publicity, including a mass mailing to our English list. (Our own counter shows just under 500 people clicked on our version of the link to the podcast.)

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.

Africa: We are discussing holding our first ever African regional meeting of LabourStart correspondents. More details soon.

Algeria: We did a second mailing to our English list today. The campaign has 4,774 supporters, but we expect this to above 5,000 today.

Nigeria: We are continuing publicity for the Yoruba versions of our campaigns, two of which have already been translated.

Sweden: We closed down our Zalando’s campaign today and informed the union there. The campaign had about 3,500 supporters, though the Swedish version only had 2.

UK: Eric was interviewed for the labour podcast “Union Dues” – it will be aired in another couple of weeks and we’ll publicise it widely.

T-shirts: We did a mailing to our German list. Sales of the dna-merch shirts have not been as high as we would have liked (they are only a fraction of what we sold last year). We will continue the marketing and are in discussions with our friends about what we can do to improve this.

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.

Campaigns:

Next week we will launch a campaign in support of an organising campaign in Israel, at the request of the Histadrut.
We launched a campaign at the request of the ITF and ETF targetting FedEx-TNT in Europe; after a week online it is in 12 languages and has 4,465 supporters.

We also launched a campaign in support of a union under pressure in Kazakhstan which has 6,293 supporters.
At the request of PSI we launched a campaign in support of jailed women activists in Algeria, which now has 8,062 supporters.
Our largest current campaign is in support of the teachers union in Jordan — it has 9,491 supporters and appears in 24 languages. I hope that campaign will exceed 10,000 supporters.
We also closed a number of the older campaigns.

Correspondents: We signed up new correspondents in the USA and Vanuatu this month.

Finland: A number of new translators volunteered and our campaigns began appearing in Finnish again.

Interns: Amos Netzer from the Global Labour University began working for us this week. We had the first-ever meeting of all 3 LabourStart interns this week as well. We will be participating in the Cornell ILR Career Fair next month. In addition, Derek has reached out to some Canadian labour studies departments to sound out the possibility of Canadian interns.

Mailing lists: I imported 918 new subscribers this month. We now have a Malaysian language list.

Poland: A number of new translators volunteered and our campaigns began appearing in Polish again.

Publicity: Eric was interviewed by Davar, the online newspaper of the Histadrut. The interview appeared in Hebrew and English.

Translators: With more than 80 volunteer translators, we called a meeting of them in mid-February. About 20% of them participated, and we ‘met’ a number of them for the first time.

Turkey: We did publicity to our list promoting a new book on the international labour movement in Turkish, written by Kivanc.

Albania: We make a modest donation to the mineworkers union, whose campaign we have been hosting for the last three months. The union is under considerable pressure and has few resources.

Egypt: A new campaign has been submitted, but there are some issues with it that need to be resolved before we can launch. We are waiting to hear back.

Germany: A huge victory in the Ameos campaign, which we close down — and report to our supporters in all languages, including a lonq quote from the union, Ver.di.

Ghana: Our new intern has begun posting news stories from Ghana and is working on other tasks to strengthen our relationship with the trade union movement there.

Philippines: At the request of the Education International, we extend the campaign for a few more months and send out a mailing with updates about ongoing repression in order to encourage people to sign up and spread the word. Very quickly, we pick up another 1,207 supporters.

UK: Eric has been invited to speak on two panels at the upcoming national conference of the teachers’ union NASUWT. He was also interviewed for the union’s magazine about international solidarity.

USA: We invest in a quarter-page advertisement in the programme for the upcoming Labor Notes conference.

Germany: The workers at Ameos win a big victory and their union, Ver.di, thanked LabourStart for our short campaign in 13 languages, which had 7,968 supporters.  (It was our biggest active campaign.)  The company complained about the large number of protest emails they were receiving. The campaign has been closed down.

Ghana: We have a new intern, Benedicta, for the next few weeks, thanks to the Global Labour University. She will help particularly with growing LabourStart’s presence in Ghana.

Ukraine: We’re expecting to launch a new campaign shortly.

USA: We’re ordered an advertisement in the conference program for Labor Notes.

Campaigns: Our campaigns website was briefly down last weekend due to a power failure in Sheffield; this was quickly resolved.

Mailing lists: We imported 360 new subscribers (supporters of recent campaigns) to 10 lists, with the largest groups going to the German (175) and English (141) lists.

Partners: We had a meeting with the new head of communications at the International Transport Workers Federation in London. Following up with our meeting with the NASUWT, a British teachers’ union, the union has scheduled an interview with Eric Lee for next week, for the union’s international solidarity magazine.

Website redesign: We’re resumed this project, and have released the new version of the Portuguese site and are finishing up the Norwegian one. We’re also making progress on the redesign of the country news pages.

Pictured: LabourStart editor Eric Lee with leaders of the Malaysian Trades Union Congress last week in Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysia: LabourStart editor Eric Lee spent several days in Malaysia, working together with the Ethical Trading Initiative on a new project they have started on migrant labour. We met with leaders of Malaysian unions, including the Malaysian Trades Union Congress, a number of pro-labour NGOs, a social democratic MP, activists from the Malaysian Socialist Party, and representatives of the global union federations BWI and IndustriALL in the country.

Pakistan campaign: At the request of the ITF, we launched a campaign in supported of 8 sacked dock workers in Karachi. After about a week online, it had just over 5,200 supporters and appeared in 13 languages.

Philippines campaign: At the request of BWI, we launched a campaign against the giant transnational company Holcim. After less than a week online, it had over 4,700 supporters and appeared in 14 languages.

Email service provider: Our current provider is MailChimp and it’s quite expensive. We are currently exploring alternatives, and have migrated some of our lists over to Sendy, a much less costly solution, using a hosting service in Belgium that specialises in this.

Telegram: Following the revelations about hacking that targetted WhatsApp — and specifically targetted activists — we set up a public LabourStart channel on the more secure Telegram platform, a closed private group for members of our Executive, and will soon announce a public discussion group using Telegram as well.

Arthur Svensson prize: LabourStart, which won this prestigious Norwegian trade union award in 2016, has been invited back to Oslo for a ceremony in June to honour the current recipient.

Bangladesh: We promoted a story about the Bangladesh Accord (IndustriALL) as a top global labour news story, and across social media.

Belgium: The transport workers union got in touch and interview Eric Lee for their online and print magazine.

Iran: We publicised as a top global news story, and across social media, the arrest of Mokhtar Asadi, a teacher in Iranian Kurdistan. We also shared the IUF’s story about Amnesty International and Iran on social media, and as a top global news story.

Jordan: We launched a campaign at the request of the ITUC and Solidarity Center. After less than two weeks online, the campaign appears in 15 languages, and has 5,270 supporters.

Kazakhstan: We closed one of our campaigns after three months online. We are still waiting for a report from the campaign sponsors.

Namibia: We made the mine strike story a top global news story.

Nigeria: We gave extensive publicity to an ITUC news story about Nigeria.

North Korea: We made a story about 150,000 forced labourers into top global labour news story and shared it widely on social media.

South Korea: Victory in our campaign together with the KPTU, who wrote to thank us. We publicised the victory across social media and with a mailing to our English list (the campaign was only translated into a few languages in the few days it was online).

Thailand: We closed one of our campaigns after three months online. We are still waiting for a report from the campaign sponsors.

Ukraine: We shared the story of the Ukrainian miners’ protest underground as a top global news story and across social media.

USA: We posted a story about a big retail strike in New England across social media.

Venezuela: We promoted the PSI statement as a stop global news story and across social media.

Zimbabwe: We posted widely about the detention of the ITUC Africa secretary general and his subsequent release.

Correspondents: We added new correspondents from Italy, the USA, Russia, and Guyana. We also posted on social media an appeal for people to signup to be correspondent (producing no results). We published online the guidelines for correspondents in Italian. We’ve received a translation of the interface for correspondence in Spanish but it needs some more work.

Mailing lists: We posted an appeal to recruit new subscribers across social media. We added 674 new campaign supporters to the lists; there was considerable growth to our Thai list this time.

Women: We wrote to all correspondents about International Women’s Day – as I did last year, using almost the same text.

Brazil: We gave extensive publicity to the IUF’s powerful editorial on the eve of the elections.

Canada: We did a mailing to our Canadian list promoting CLIFF, the labour film festival.

Italy: As we were having some difficulties getting our campaigns and mailings translated, we invited 819 Italian speakers on our English mailing list to volunter to help with translations — and have been inundated with many positive responses.

Poland: We did something similar to the Polish list, and now have translators and translations of our campaigns after a very long time.

Spain: We have been approached by Spanish unions about launching a campaign and hope to do this shortly.

Turkey: We shared Human Rights Watch’s story about the Istanbul airport struggle widely. At the moment, our campaign has 8,459 supporters and appears in 21 languages, with more coming. This campaign too should rise to above 10,000 supporters.

USA: We shared Unite Here’s Marriott campaign to social networks. We also shared widely a news story from the USA about journalists in new media who are organising and voting to strike.

Campaigns: We’ve improved the ability to share campaigns by email with friends in English. The French version is also being prepared now. We also now have translations of a basic text to use 7 days after a campaign launch, when writing a followup message to people who haven’t yet opened our mailing — this is now in English, French, Italian, Russian and Turkish, and our campaigns will now always receive a boost after a week in those languages. (Previously, we did this only in English.) Our attempts to find new volunteer translators for our campaigns in Arabic has not yet resulted in anything concrete, despite writing directly to more than 2,000 Arabic speakers on our English list.

Mailing lists: We added just 45 new subscribers to our lists, most of them for our Turkish list.

Articles: We shared Eric’s article from the current issue of International Union Rights magazine, on the subject of online campaigning as a top news story on LabourStart and on social networks.