Mar
28
2022
0

ILO: LabourStart provides extensive coverage of key decisions, new leadership

ILO: We gave extensive publicity on LabourStart’s home page and across social media to some key developments at the meeting of the ILO Governing Body last week — including the passage of a resolution on Ukraine and Russia, and the election of a new, union-backed Director General.

GLU conference: At the request of the Global Labour University we have helped to promote their annual conference with a mass mailing to our list. It appears that nearly 500 people from our list clicked through to learn more about or register for the conference.

Interns: Tomorrow marks the final day at work for our three interns from the Global Labour University – Jessica, Malaika and Zubair. We cannot thank them enough for all that they did during their time with us.

Donations: We received a generous donation from Industriall Europe.

T-shirts: We promoted the latest Working Class History t-shirt of the month across our social media accounts.

Written by admin in: Fund-raising,ILO,Intern |
Feb
11
2022
0

Three new campaigns coming?

 

Campaigns: We expect to launch campaigns shortly in support of workers in Colombia, Lithuania and Turkey. Details soon.

Algeria: With the agreement of IndustriALL we have now closed this campaign. Unfortunately, our comrade Ramzi is still in jail. The struggle continues.

Cambodia: We wrote to dozens of our translators in six languages — resulting in three more translations. But we still have nothing in Japanese, Arabic and Swedish, which is a problem. The campaign continues to grow — now in 22 languages with 12,355 supporters. But growth has slowed.

Iran: At the request of some comrades, we shared statements from Iranian workers’ organisations about expelling Iran from the ILO with senior figures in the global unions.

Jordan: Next month we will host (and promote) a major global webinar in support of Jordan’s embattled teachers’ union. We will reactivate the online campaign before then.

Fund raising: Two unions in Norway made generous donations last week.

Interns: Our three new interns will start their work on Wednesday next week.

Mailing lists: Our mailing lists continue to grow due to the Cambodia campaign – we picked up 223 new subscribers this week, and doubled the size of our small Hindi language list.

Internationalisation: We made a number of improvements to the Russian language home page, adding corrections to the language and replacing the occasional English phrase with the Russian equivalent.

Working Class History T-shirts: We discussed next steps with our friends at DNA-Merch and received payment for the few shirts we sold.

Mar
07
2018
0

New campaign launched in support of Turkish clothing workers

It’s been two-and-a-half weeks since I last updated this blog, so, apologies for that. It’s been a busy time — keep reading …

We launched a major new campaign in support of workers in Turkey who are being sacked for joining a trade union by a German clothing business, Roy Robson. After less than a week online, the campaign appears in 15 languages and has 5,853 supporters. One of our German supporters received an interesting reply from the company, which he shared with us — and which we shared with IndustriALL, whose campaign this is. Meanwhile, the company has attempted to block our messages, but we retain the option of a petition version, which we will deliver to them, even if they’re not letting individual messages through by email. We publicised on social media the fact that they were trying to block us.

The Georgia campaign which we launched just three weeks ago continues to grow. It’s now up to 5,983 supporters in 19 languages. Over 400 of those supporters were responding to the Georgian language version of the campaign. We re-discovered a problem with this campaign and have noted to avoid it in future: sometimes, when the default message text is long, we need to break it up into shorter paragraphs, otherwise some servers reject this and we get error messages.

We also had a problem with some translations of campaigns not reaching us through the usual online form. We dealt with this by storing the translations on the server as well as sending them by email, so they are not lost. This appears to now work and we have not missed any translations since then.

We heard from the Georgian union which asked us to run the previous campaign (Rustavi Azot). Here is what they reported to us: “During the entire year 2017, the company conducted a very strong pressure against the trade union organization using various means. In fact, it was a fierce battle waged against local leaders and unfortunately, they could not resist. The company destroyed the trade union, but plenty of dedicated people still remain there and, in the future, they will restart the struggle and restore the organization. The international support received through the LabourStart was of huge help to our members. When you are supported by an army of people of more than 7,000 people, this is a very big incentive and motivation. Thanks to all of you, thanks to LabourStart, thanks to IndustriALL Global Union.

We’re continuing efforts to revive dormant languages, with some success. We sent out our first mailing to our Finnish list in several years, now that we have volunteer translators again for that language. We’re currently trying to get a volunteer translator for Thai. And we’re continuing with Japanese, Swedish and other languages that we had not been using for some time.

Next month is the Labor Notes conference in Chicago, at which LabourStart will have a stall. Derek Blackadder is coordinating our effort there. This is an important event, which will have well over 2,000 participants. We’ve shipped over copies of our most recent book (on organising migrant workers), have prepared a special flyer and website, and are arranging for the ILO to ship over copies of their new book on improving trade union communications which includes a positive reference to LabourStart.

We continue to try to recruit new subscribers to the mailing lists — this is now a regular weekly effort and includes reminders on social media, as well as the occasional pop-up window on our website.

Our mailing lists continue to grow. In the last couple of weeks we added 485 addresses of campaign supporters. Most of these are added to our new Georgian language list.

We’re going to continue with regular (probably monthly) “explainers” — mailings to our list with 500 word articles by local experts. The first one was by Derek on the split in the Canadian trade unions. For our second one, we’re hoping for a US writer (we’ve already approached one) to explain the Janus case before the Supreme Court.

We’ve had a request for RSS versions of our US state newswires, so we’re working on that. We already have this in JavaScript format, but RSS works better for some.

Finally, in the UK, we’re being given an award this coming weekend by the Ron Todd Foundation. Ron Todd was the general secretary of the TGWU, a forerunner of today’s Unite the Union. We invited UK supporters of LabourStart to attend the event at the Marx Memorial Library in London.

Feb
09
2017
0

Online campaigns: Unions must be open to new ideas and new ways of working

Presentation to ILO event ” Communication Strategies to Strengthen Workers’ Organizations: Advocacy and Campaigns”, Geneva – 7 February 2017

by Eric Lee

First of all, thank you very much to ACTRAV for the opportunity to speak with trade unionists from all over the world. And thank you for letting me hear some of your thoughts in the questionnaires you filled in – which I hope will guide some of this discussion today.

Though I’ve been invited to speak for the session on advocacy and campaigns, I’d like to say a word about an issue a number of you raised in your answers to the questionnaire.

Many of you pointed out the problem of mass media that either ignore trade unions, or are hostile to trade unions. This is a subject that is very important to me and it is the reason why LabourStart was created 19 years ago. We wanted to create a space on the web where trade unionists could learn about each others’ struggles and problems – and victories. And we created a news service that works in dozens of languages. We have a network of over 850 volunteers who regularly add links to news stories to our database. We typically link to 200 or more news stories every day, all over the world. So if you want to know what’s happening in the labour movement anywhere in the world, you should start by visiting LabourStart.org. And if you don’t see news from your union or your country there, you should volunteer to be a correspondent.

I should also mention that you don’t need to visit LabourStart’s website to see the news we’ve collected. We have had a labour newswire for many years which shares our content on hundreds of trade union websites.

But as the focus of this session is on advocacy and campaigns, I want to introduce you to LabourStart’s online campaigns.

Let me start not with the technology, but with the real world. The only reason I am here today to speak with you is that we have had many success stories where our online campaigns have contributed to workers’ victories. Those online campaigns have helped get jailed worker activists released from prison, end company lockouts, bring employers back to the negotiating table, win union recognition, and much more.

About five years ago, the military dictatorship in Fiji jailed two of the country’s most prominent trade union leaders. Following the launch of an online campaign sponsored by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and run on the LabourStart website, some 4,000 messages of protest were sent in less than 24 hours. The government relented, the union leaders were freed, and the campaign suspended.

A month earlier, Suzuki workers locked out in India waged a successful online campaign through the International Metalworkers Federation – now IndustriALL – and LabourStart. Almost 7,000 messages flooded the company’s inboxes, and after only a few days, a compromise was reached.

We’ve had so many victories like those that a couple of years ago, we produced a short book called Campaigning Online and Winning. We’ve now finished writing a new version of that book – it’s much longer – listing lots of other campaigns we’ve helped to win. That book should be available later this month.

The spectacular success of those campaigns is the culmination of a 20 year long process of building up the campaigning capacity of the international trade union movement – specifically that of the ITUC and the global union federations (including IndustriALL, the IUF, and others), and the role played by LabourStart in that process.

My talk today will focus on the rather narrow topic of global online labour campaigns, to see where we have been, where we are now, and to speculate where we go next.

The global labour movement has been doing online campaigning for more than thirty years. The first international trade secretariats (now called global union federations) went online in the 1980s and have been campaigning ever since. For more than a decade, we have campaigned using a combination of mass emailings and web-based tools mostly modelled on successful campaigning websites such as Avaaz and 38 Degrees (in the UK).

Today the ITUC and the GUFs tend to campaign either using LabourStart, or using a system similar to (and based on) LabourStart’s custom-built software. As a result of this, LabourStart’s mailing lists have grown steadily, from just a couple of thousand at the beginning of this century to more than 135,000 today. Those mailing lists of trade union activists are at the heart of online labour campaigning today. They are what allow us to deliver thousands of protest messages in 24 hours.

But the potential is much greater than this. The ITUC, for example, represents 181 million workers in 163 countries. The 135,000 names of activists on LabourStart’s lists are a tiny fraction of that number – less than one in a thousand. 99.9% of the members of ITUC-affiliated unions are not yet on our mailing list. There is a lot of room for growth.

Other campaigning organizations, which have grown up out of nowhere with no built-in membership base like trade unions, have much larger audiences. For example, Avaaz claims over 44 million supporters world-wide; the UK’s 38 Degrees website claims 3 million supporters. Unions have been slow to pick up on the importance of online campaigning, and as a result lag behind NGOs like these.

And it’s not only NGOs. Political campaigns have also managed to mobilise vast numbers of people. I was very active in the campaign last year to select Senator Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. The size our our campaign, the number of people involved, was far greater than anything I’ve seen done by the trade union movement online.

Why unions lag behind in the adoption of effective online campaigning technology is complicated, and varies from union to union and from country to country. As the widespread use of social networks like Facebook during the Arab Spring showed, there is no simple North/South divide here. Some of the most powerful unions in some of the richest countries use the net poorly. And there have been extremely effective net-based campaigns run by unions in the global South.

The global trade union movement is already experiencing the problems of campaign fatigue and information overload. There is a fear that the campaigning model which has worked well for a decade may be faltering. And there are questions about what comes next.

I want to spend the rest of my talk focussing on that – on the future of online campaigning in the trade union movement.

One noticeable trend is a growth in the number of languages we campaign in. LabourStart has a new campaign demanding that the Norwegian energy company DNO treat its workers in Yemen fairly. That campaign appears, of course, in English, Norwegian and Arabic. But it also appears in 12 other languages too.

This is far cry from the days when unions would publish online in just English, French and Spanish. LabourStart campaigns now appear in Turkish, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese – hugely important languages for the international trade union movement, but ones which a decade ago were rarely seen on global labour websites.

We can expect in the next decade to see even more languages used — especially the languages of countries with growing industrial working classes, such as Thai, Tagalog, Korean, Portuguese, Indonesian and Vietnamese. A decade from now, it will not be unusual to see online campaigns running in dozens of languages.

The model for today’s global online labour campaigns remains very PC-centric. We imagine thousands of trade unionists working in offices, sitting at their desks reading an email, clicking on a link, opening a website and filling in a form. But already today, this is not how people actually work.

A significant percentage of those now learning about a global labour campaign via email are reading that email in a smartphone. If they click on a link in the message, the website that displays must render correctly on a small screen, and the entering of data such as one’s name and email address, must be as simple and easy as possible. Few unions have taken this into account, but it will be essential in the years to come. As a result, it is likely that we will see the rise of small-screen-specific campaigning apps for trade unions. These apps will need to be platform-independent, able to work on all kinds of phones and tablets.

And of course the model of email messages pointing to websites is itself fading, as more and more people come to use social networks such as Twitter and Facebook as their models for online communication. Among young people, studies show a declining use of email and an increasing reliance on other tools, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Snapchat.

Unions need to take this into account when deciding how to promote their campaigns, and they need to use simultaneously a wide range of media — including social networks and instant messaging — to reach their members and supporters. Email is likely to remain part of that package, but can no longer be the only way to get the word out.

A decade from now we will probably discover other things online protest campaigns can do beyond filling up the inbox of employers and governments with protest messages. It’s likely that we’ll continue to do that, but we also need to find other ways of putting pressure on governments and employers to respect workers’ rights.

One of the traditional trade union tools that has been under-utilised in recent years has been the boycott — and its opposite, the “buy union” campaigns. Both can be done more effectively online and at a fraction of the cost of old-fashioned offline versions. In a hyper-competitive market, if unions can cause a tiny fraction of sales to fall for one company, and to rise for another, this might give us the leverage that we never had in the past.

And beyond using our power as consumers to reward and punish companies, we can be inspired by the example of the Arab Spring, Occupy and other movements and consider the possibility of using online campaigns not only to apply pressure online, but as a tool to bring people into the streets.

In the years to come global unions will still campaign online, but they will do so in ways radically different from how we work today — and the result will be more powerful and effective trade unions. But to achieve that, we must be open to new ideas, and new ways of working.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,ILO |
Nov
20
2015
0

The last 26 days

I’ve been late with an update because of a family vacation, but here’s a brief update on the last 26 days at LabourStart. (more…)

Sep
07
2015
--

Summer’s over – and LabourStart gets busy again

It’s not been much of summer here in London, but then again, it never is.

Here’s how we’ve spent the last 3 weeks:

Campaigns

We launched one in support of port workers in Gdansk, together with Solidarnosc and the ITF. As today, it has 7,045 supporters and appears in 14 languages, including Polish.

We also launched a new campaign in support of striking workers at the National Gallery in London, together with PSI and the PCS union in Britain. After just a week, the campaign has 6,140 supporters and appears in 9 languages.

We closed down the China campaign, launched in June. It had 10,373 supporters. The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions told us that the campaign helped “to spread out the message and to draw attention to the imprisoned labour activists” and “although we did not hear any feedback from the Chinese government, there is one [piece of] legislation which was mentioned in this statement restricting the operation and international connection of NGOs in mainland was postponed.”

After closing the recent Hungary campaign, we receive this from the union: “Tamás Járási, president of MCDSz, thanks all those who supported this campaign. The company was upset by it, and told workers it was not a ‘true’ campaign but ‘only a spam driven from London’, and apparently complained to the Dutch ambassador about it. The union judged the campaign to be a success, and said it strengthened morale among the workers. Meanwhile, the struggle continues.”

We have been asked for help by a union in Congo and have passed this on to UNI, who are looking into it.

We’ve agreed to help BWI with a campaign in the Gulf region later this month.

An Iran solidarity group is keen to have us help with a particular prisoner; we’ve raised this with friends at Amnesty International.  It is not clear which GUF could be called upon to support this particular prisoner.

We had a request for a campaign from the Colombia Solidarity Campaign, but have not heard anything back from them after we asked some questions.

We also had a request for a campaign from Zimbabwe that stalled, and we await answers.

Mailing lists

We’ve improved the layout of mailings to our English list to give readers the chance to sign up to campaigns they missed, to donate to LabourStart, and more.

There was an attempt to add over 100 fake addresses to one of our lists, but we spotted it and spent some time dealing with the problem. We’ll need to tighten up security on our campaigns form to prevent this happening in future.

Books

We’ve resumed our partnership with unionized bookshop Powells.com with a low-key publicity campaign for a ‘book of the month’. This has led to a bit of an overhaul of our state news pages, with the country news pages coming next. (See the US states to see what I mean, for example Kentucky.)

Our Global Labour Movements book is currently being translated into Burmese (by the ILO office in Burma), into Portuguese (by Euan, our correspondent in Brazil) and Canadian (well, a Canadian edition) by Derek. The book is already available in English and French.

Events

Our events module wasn’t working on some pages (e.g., Canada, Portuguese) but is now, having been fixed.

Talks & other publicity

I have been invited to speak about LabourStart campaigns to UNISON Waltham Forest, in North London.

I will also be interviewed by an Italian-language magazine based in Luxemburg, about LabourStart, thanks to Silvana.

Apps

Andy has done the translation so that our next Android app will appear in French – in addition to the versions we have in English, Norwegian and Esperanto.

Global Solidarity Conference 2016

We’re still planning on this happening next spring in Toronto, and are waiting to confirm a final date.

Retreat

A lot of work was done by myself and others to prepare for next week’s Strategic Retreat in Brussels. More here when the Retreat is over.

Jul
08
2015
--

Iran, Turkey, Morocco, Malaysia, Norway, Burma and Transnistria – another week goes by at LabourStart

esmailCampaigns:

We launched a new campaign demanding the release of a jailed Iranian teacher trade union leader, Esmail Abdi, which instantly became one of our largest. The campaign has 6,700 supporters after less than two days online. Canadian teachers unions have launched a Thunderclap to help build support for this.  If you have a Twitter or Facebook account, please sign up to support this and spread the word about it.

We’ve also been asked to support a campaign in Turkey and Morocco this week as well. We’re waiting to hear from the IFJ and EFJ about a possible campaign in defense of a journalist in Transnistria who is a LabourStart correspondent.

I did a followup mailing on the Malaysia forestry workers campaign in English. That campaign is well over 8,000 messages sent, making it our second largest current campaign.  But I expect the Iran campaign to overtake it in a day or two.  Followup emails sent a week after we do the initial mailing are important, and I always do them in English.  If the translators for our other large lists (French, German, Spanish) want to do the same, it might help get several hundred additional supporters for our campaigns.

Mailing lists:

We picked up 974 new subscribers this week following the launch of our Iran campaign. We’re now have 132,173 subscribers to our various lists.

Social networks:

Our Facebook page now has 10,021 likes. I’ve stopped paying for advertising and growth from today will be organic. That ad campaign cost us $95.29 and generated 583 new page likes.

Apps:

Our Android app in Norwegian is now nearly done — just a couple more tweaks and it will go live on Google Play. We’ll begin work on other languages, using this as the template.

Books:

The ILO office in Burma needed a Word version of our global labour movement book; this has been found and sent to them.

Jul
02
2015
--

Breakthrough in Europe, and more …

eescYesterday, thanks to the initiative of Silvana, I was invited to address the regular meeting of the Workers Group of the European Economic and Social Committee, a gathering of nearly 100 trade union leaders from all over Europe.  LabourStart was given 30 minutes on the agenda and we followed their adoption of a statement on Greece.  I spoke and showed a PowerPoint presentation (see it here as a PDF), and we distributed LabourStart flyers to all delegates.  There was a lively discussion, and some were quite familiar with our work and praised it.  Others were introduced to LabourStart for the first time and are keen to work with us, including the Lithuanian delegation.

Following the online campaigning course last week in Hattingen, Germany, we’ve heard from two participants — one from Malta who has begun translating our campaigns into Maltese, and one from the European Federation of Journalists who will be working with us on our next campaign.

Our Malaysia campaign continues to grow and is up to 6,459 supporters as of mid-day today.

Thanks to our ongoing ad campaign, we’re nearly up to 10,000 fans on Facebook — we have picked up 247 new fans in the last 8 days, and have just 110 to go.

We’ll be able to revive the Labour Video of the Year competition thanks to our ongoing partnership with the London Labour Film Festival, which takes place this year in September.  More details soon.

The ILO office in Burma has asked permission to translate our book on the Global Labour Movement into Burmese and publish it there.  We’ve agreed.

Finally, I visited this week with a London-based web design company which organized the recent Hack Day at Mozilla which had a trade union theme and at which we made a presentation.  They’re keep to help with with technological issues and have some very interesting ideas (and a wealth of experience).  We’re considering sharing office space with them, so this could be the beginning of a kind of partnership which could help us enormously.

 

Apr
21
2015
--

Spring begins at LabourStart …

It was my intention to update the blog weekly, but that hasn’t happened for the last few weeks, so here are short reports on the first month of spring …

Apps

  • English: Andromo has made the fix we requested which will stop closed campaigns from showing in the app.  I need to test this fully the next time we close a campaign, which will be next week, and once I’m satisfied that this works, the new version of the app will go live in the Google Play store.
  • Norwegian: I did a lot of work on the Norwegian language Android app, which will serve as a model for our apps in other languages.  It’s very nearly done.

Campaigns

  • Even though the Rio Tinto campaign has been closed down, I’ve helped IndustriALL keep up the pressure by publicizing and participating in their recent protest in London at the Rio Tinto AGM.
  • The closed Turkish hospital campaign was reopened for a couple of weeks at Gisela’s request, as Ver.di was going to help publicize the campaign. Unfortunately, after a full week online, only 6 additional supporters have signed up to the campaign.
  • At the request of IndustriALL, I’ll let the Holcim campaign run for another few weeks.
  • PSI has helpfully offered to publicize the Swaziland campaign which we launched at the request of the ITUC on 24 March.  That campaign is growing slowly and has just 6,733 supporters today.

Courses

  • European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) course on online campaigning in June: This is a course we helped developed and run, and for the first time we’ve been given the green light to publicize it.  I’ve done this with emails and through social media, repeatedly, in the last few weeks.  LabourStart correspondents who are based in Europe should apply to attend.
  • I also publicized the Global Labour University course at their request.

Fundraising

  • We’ll do our annual fundraising appeal next week; I’ve sent around a request for thoughts to a few senior correspondents and will shortly be circulating a draft appeal.

Mailing list

  • This has been growing slowly as we’ve only had one new campaign in this period.  New campaign supporters continue to be added on a weekly basis.

News

  • I don’t normally report on this, but we should never forget how much work is being done every day by our volunteer correspondents.  So far in April (first 20 days), 65 of our 775 volunteer correspondents have posted 4,002 news stories to LabourStart — averaging 200 stories per day, or 61 per correspondent so far this month.  Leading the pack are some very active correspondents including Andrew Casey (809), Olivier Delbeke (718), Derek Blackadder (517), Roy Nitzberg (392) and Ginger Goodwin (203).

Outreach

  • Europe: Thanks to Silvana’s initiative, I’ve now met with senior figures in the European Economic and Social Committee Workers’ Group, and have been invited to address the group — which consists of trade unionists from across Europe — in July.  Two EESC staffers are now LabourStart correspondents.
  • Italy: Silvana has done some excellent work reaching out to Italian trade unions – a more detailed report is coming soon.

Retreat

  • We’ve done a lot of work to prepare for the LabourStart retreat in Brussels in September, working closely with ETUI on this.

Union Made

  • This is a possible new project we might help with – especially with publicity.  We’re working closely with the New Unionism Project on this.  More details soon.
Jul
23
2013
1

The week in review – 20-23 July

This will be my last update for a while — I will be back at my desk on 12 August for a week and a half, and then back to work after the summer break on 28 August.

Mailing lists: I fixed the link on the English and new French home pages to ensure that anyone signing up to mailing lists there is added to our old MailChimp lists.  I migrated some who had subscribed (prematurely) to the new Sendy lists.  We’re not yet using Sendy for English or French, but we will.

Campaigns: I’ve sent out monthly reminders to our partners in general, and specific ones to our friends at the 3 Cosas campaign in London and GE workers in Erie, Pennsylvania campaign at the two-month mark.  We’ve promoted the Maruti Suzuki campaign in Hindi to more than 300 Indians who are on our English language mailing list.  We’re beginning to grow a small mailing list in Hindi as a result.

Books: I’ve followed up with CreateSpace and our bank about missing royalty payments totalling over £500.  We’ve been asked to ship 60 copies of our Global Labour Movement book to the founding congress of the International Domestic Workers Network in Montevideo in October.

Asia: I’ve followed up with the 15 trade union communicators I met at the recent ILO course in Turin, asking them to support, publicize, and translate our campaigns, and to signup as volunteer correspondents.

Publicity: I was interviewed this morning for an article to appear in Labour Research.

Kiev conference in November: Edd and I have been invited to participate in an event linking together trade unionists and democratic socialists from across the former Soviet Union.  One of the days will be devoted to a meeting of LabourStart correspondents from across the region.

Brussels course in October: I’ll be teaching trade unions from across Europe about campaigning in a course organized by the European Trade Union Institute.  I did this last year by Skype; this year, they’re bringing me over to Brussels.

LabourStart home page in French: Edd has done a lot more work on this and we are nearly ready for launch.  We’ll be meeting Andy in London in August and can finalize then.

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