Inside LabourStart

This week we were able to focus on two major events on the labour calendar around the world: International Workers’ Memorial Day and May Day. Our coverage of both events was exemplary, with hundreds of stories posted.

In the run up to May Day, Eric was invited to be on a panel with Iranian emigre activists focussing on workers’ struggles in the Islamic Republic. Here is what he said.

We created a shortlist of six students from Cornell University who have applied to be interns this coming fall. We will interview them all next week. Thanks to Derek, Penny and Isabel for helping to review all the applicant submissions.

And a special thanks to Isabel who has now completed her second internship with LabourStart.

Our mailing lists continue to grow, picking up 159 new subscribers this week — mostly for the English list.

And finally, we signed up one new correspondent from the USA and have just received an application from another one, in Nigeria.

What follows is a brief summary of highlights followed by the usual long list of numbers.

SUMMARY:

Our new podcast service is picking up and we have passed the 7000 downloads mark.  Older episodes continue to see new downloads, suggesting that the word is still getting out about the series.

Our first podcast to break the 500 downloads mark dropped in March, an interview with the President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees regarding his union’s reaction to Trump’s threat to ‘annex’ Canada.

We continue to see changes in the mailing lists as the problems that resulted from several mailing service provider changes are corrected but growth has returned.  Spanish has displaced German as our third-largest list.

Our two Bluesky accounts are managed in much different ways.  Sporadic efforts were made the increase the followers of the global accounts which now stands at 15,301, up from 13.2k.  The Canadian English-language account went from 297 to 353.

XTwitter feeds continue to decline.  Most or all of that can be attributed to our followers abandoning the platform for Bluesky and perhaps Mastodon.

Our other numbers remain fairly stable.

THE NUMBERS:

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the last report. Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since our last report.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

STORIES POSTED TO OUR NEWS SITE IN THE LAST MONTH:

3807 (123 per day)-2927 (105 per day)

MAILING LISTS:

The lists are being rebuilt after some technical hiccups so the numbers can be expected to fluctuate considerably over the next month or two.

The top 10:

English: 85126-84862

French: 7089-7075

Spanish: 5566-5553

German: 5522-5511

Turkish: 4503-4460

Korean: 3197

Italian: 2828-2824

Russian: 2677

Norwegian: 2003-1996

Romanian:  1730

Dutch: 1437

The others:

Arabic:  770-763

Belarusian:  299-288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 965-964

Creole:  11

Czech: 58

Danish: 79

Esperanto: 187

Farsi:  164

Finnish:  439

Georgian:  176

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  270

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  172

Indonesian:  385

Japanese: 382

Lithuanian:  62

Malaysian: 20

Polish: 964

Portuguese: 1274

Punjabi:  2

Serbian:  97

Sinhalese: 1

Slovak: 15

Swedish: 909

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  142

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive:  12

Interns and Past Interns:  15

LabourStart Correspondents:  611

LabourStart Translators:  104

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69

Donors:  885

FLICKR:

Members:  838

Photos:  10351-10337

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  133-135

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  14k, details unavailable

Global Labour News and Information: 9.2k

LabourStart UK likes:  2.1k, details unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 620 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 489

LabourStart Brasil:  552

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV likes: 465

LabourStart TV follows:  455

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Italia:  68

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 191

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

LINKEDIN:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2640-2634

Page: 322-317

PODCASTS:

We passed the 5000 downloads mark in January.  By labour podcast standards this is considered more than reasonable given the effort required.

LabourStart is a member of the US-based Labor Radio / Podcast Network.

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the three (3) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. 533 downloads: Interview with Mark Hancock, President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees re. the union’s recently-adopted “Montreal Declaration” which was drafted in response to US President Donald Trump’s threats against Canada.
2. 424-423 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
3. 321-320 downloads: Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)

BLUESKY:

As an experiment we created a global news in English feed mid-November.  The account is growing far more quickly than any other of our social media accounts ever did.  A Canadian English-language feed was added in late December.

Our Mastodon experience, as with most people’s, was not great as the initial excitement wore off quite quickly.  That does not appear to be happening with Bluesky.

No concerted effort was made to grow either account last month.

Global English-language: 16.5k-15301

Canada-English-language: 378-353

X (TWITTER as-was):

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  If we wish to maintain our footprint we will have to start doing so again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.  Whether that is possible is another question given the current flight of users from the platform.

We experienced decline in all accounts except the Australian, which grew slightly.  Prior to the exodus to Bluesky all would have usually experienced slow growth without any effort on our part.  This is almost certainly the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Bluesky or Mastodon).

Global English: 36303-36431

Canada English: 20202-20949

Global Portuguese: 9925-9956

Global Spanish: 10247-10265

Australia: 9422-9702

USA: 4683-4708

Canada French: 3101-3107

Russian: 50

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329-330 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 224 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

South Asia (English): 28 Placeholder and not yet active.

Campaigns: Our Telus campaign in Turkey grew by just 130 new supporters this week. The launch of the French language version will help, but this campaign is still far too small and comrades are encouraged to promote it more widely. We have several other campaigns in the pipeline.

Podcasts: Our third podcast of the year, with Kivanç Eliaçik, is already our most popular this year, with 200 downloads so far. Today we interviewed Liza Merliak from Belarus for our 4th podcast of the year, going live in the next few days.

News: In the first 27 days of February, our volunteer correspondents posted on average 104 news stories per day, a small decline compared to earlier in the month. But the number of volunteer correspondents posting news has grown by 26% since the end of 2024. Last week we did our second regular, monthly mailing to correspondents — this has helped to increase the involvement of some.

Fundraising: We’ve asked for help from the e-campaigning community in finding a PayPal alternative, which we could use in addition to PayPal. As we reported earlier, our supporters in New Zealand can’t use PayPal to donate to us, and other issues have come up in other countries.

Campaigns: We launched our first campaign of 2025 — in support of Telus workers in Turkey. As of today, the campaign appears in 13 languages and has 3,089 supporters.

Podcasts: We posted our third podcast of 2025, an interview with Kivanç Eliaçik, Director of International Relations Department for DISK. It is already the most popular podcast we did this year. We are hoping to record and share another podcast next week. In addition, one of our volunteers is readying our first long-form podcast.

News: In the first 21 days of February, our volunteer correspondents posted 2,253 new stories, an average of 107 per day.

Webinar: Three members of the LabourStart Executive spoke at the recent webinar on “Trade union struggles in authoritarian regimes”. We were informed that half of the participants — perhaps more — came due to the publicity we did for the event.

Syria: We had an online meeting with three leaders of the union of teachers in north and east Syria and followed this up by email.

Instagram: We revived our account there, and have gone up from 596 followers to 662, an increase of 11%.

Fundraising: We discovered that supporters in New Zealand have been unable to donate using PayPal and have changed our page to reflect this. We are now looking into alternatives.

Women workers at Nike: We supported the campaign launched by Global Labor Justice and managed to increase the number of pledged supporters by nearly 60%.

YoungWorkers.org: We publicly launched this new site this week with posts to social media and a mention in our mass mailing to the English list.

Mailings: We picked up 139 new subscribers this week, many of them for our Turkish list.

 

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Podcasts: We posted our second podcast of 2025 this week (interview with ICTUR’s Daniel Blackburn) and recorded our third — an interview with our own Kivanc from DISK Turkey, which will go live next week. Our 30.1 interview with Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage has already been downloaded 155 times in its first week online, which is already more popular than six of our earlier interviews. Our most popular podcast was downloaded 421 times.

Campaigns: We are just about to launch our first campaign of 2025 — possibly as early as today — with a couple more in the pipeline.

News: Our correspondents posted 817 news stories in the first 7 days of this month, or 117 news stories per day. The average number of news stories posted each day continues to rise. We wrote to all 858 inactive correspondents; as a result, a couple asked to be removed from the database, while others asked to be given new passwords. We will continue efforts to get our existing correspondents to be active, while also recruiting new ones.

Webinar: We are supporting the webinar on “Trade union struggles in authoritarian regimes” taking place next week. Three members of the LabourStart Executive will be speaking at the event. We did a dedicated mass mailing to promote the webinar and extensive publicity across social media, as well as making it our top priority global news story.

ICTUR: Following up on our podcast interview with ICTUR’s Daniel Blackburn, we had a meeting with him to discuss future collaboration with LabourStart. In the past, we partnered with ICTUR to promote their journal International Union Rights, and may do so again this year.

Syria: We have a call scheduled for next week with a teachers’ union in northern and eastern Syria. This is our first contact with Syrian trade unionists, who reached out to us.

Instagram: We’re going to resume promoting our content on Instagram as our old/new intern Isabel will be taking this on. We have 596 followers on Instagram and can grow this number if we make an effort.

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Podcasting: Our first podcast interview this year has gone live (thanks Pat!), a second one has been recorded and a third interview is scheduled for Monday. We are on course for one podcast interview every week in 2025, which will be great. This week we also fixed a bug — all the non-English LabourStart home pages were showing a wrong link for the podcasts. (Thanks Espen for pointing this out.)

Campaigns: We have several in the pipeline, including in Turkey, Thailand, Myanmar and Liberia. More details soon.

Fundraising: All the translations of our fundraising message have gone out, but the total income has not increased significantly. We will do a followup mailing to the English list which should help.

Next generation: We held a meeting with former interns and have begun work on a Young Workers news page. One of our interns, Isabel, is back with us for three months, starting this week.

News: With well over 3,000 news stories posted this month, we’re averaging over 104 per day — a very big increase compared to the first nine days of January when the average was just 78 per day. The number of active correspondents is growing, up 15% compared to last month. Our goal is to increase the number of active correspondents three-fold this year, so we are on course.

Correspondents: We have a new form and it works. We signed up three new correspondents this week — from Georgia, Ireland and Spain. We also reached out again to our lists in South Africa and Ireland in an attempt to recruit more correspondents; other countries will follow now that we see the form is working.

News: We added about 720 news stories in the last week, which is a signficantly higher number per day than we were experiencing earlier this month. The number of active correspondents this month is up by 10% compared to last month and we expect that to grow.

Podcasting: We’ve lined up the first three podcasts for 2025, starting next week. Please suggest more names for people for us to interview — we want, if possible, to do one show every week.

Fundraising: In the last week, due to fundraising messages to our supporters, we raised £2,021.88. We also received a pledge of £2,809.22 from a union in Canada. We also received a €400 donation from a Danish union. So, a very good week for us. (But we also got our tax bill, which wipes out a lot of that gain.)

Next generation: We polled our former interns and will have our next online meeting next week.

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While many global union websites are slow to return to normal after the holidays, we’ve kept LabourStart going all the way through.

Android app: We have taken the first step to building an Android app for LabourStart. We expect this will take several months as there’s a steep learning curve. If successful, we will aim later in the year to create an iOS app as well. For many people, their phones (especially low-cost Android phones) are the way they connect to the net, so it is extremely important that we be accessible there as well.

News: In the first 9 days of 2025, our correspondents posted 705 stories — an average of 78 stories per day, or one every 18 minutes. This year we have set the goal to triple the number of active correspondents.

Recruiting new correspondents: We have sent out targetted emails to our South African (459) and Irish (1,722) lists. The latter received a message from us two days ago. So far, no new correspondents have signed up and we are checking to see if there’s a technical problem.

Inside LabourStart: This blog — which you’re reading right now — allows people to sign up to receive emails every time it is updated. Today we have 100 subscribers, nearly all of them our volunteer correspondents. We are going to increase the number of people receiving those updates and as a first step, we’ve added a sign-up box on the right side of this page.

LabourStart-branded merchandise: With our cool new logo, it’s time to make things like t-shirts and mugs available. We found a wonderful co-op in the USA which we could work with, but they need to sort out world-wide shipping first. We’re working on this.

Goals for 2025: In addition to the things mentioned above, in 2025 we will reduce our long-term to-do list (over 80 tasks, some quite old) by one per week on average. We’ll publish at least one book (we have three in the pipeline in draft form). We’ll continue our work with a new generation of activists. And we’ll fight hard for workers’ rights — everywhere in the world that they are threatened.

It was a quiet week with most trade union offices closed — but it was also the week that Amazon and Starbucks workers made the news with unprecedented strike actions in different countries.

Georgia: The Evolution strikers proposed a new text for a new campaign, which we are discussing with them.

News: Despite a slowdown in labour news due to holiday season union office shutdowns, our correspondents have posted 1,969 links — about 73 news stories a day. Big thanks to Derek, Eric, Espen, Kyle and Pat for leading the way.

Norway: LO Oslo has now pledged a generous donation.

Urdu language campaigns: We are nearly there, just need to tweak some things on the landing page.

Well, it’s been two weeks, actually. And there’s a lot to report, so here goes:

Recruiting new correspondents: This is a priority for us and we’re going to tackle it one country at a time. This week we wrote to our 459 email subscribers in South Africa asking them to check out our news page and to apply to be correspondents.

Turkey campaign: This has been growing, now with 4,510 supporters. The campaign appears in 21 languages, which is a lot for us. Among these is Urdu, for the very first time, I think. We also picked up over 100 new subscribers to our mailing list from Turkey in a recent update.

Thailand campaign: Yesterday this was our smallest current campaign, with just 3,842 supporters. But a follow-up mailing to the English list meant we picked up over 700 new supporters and are now up to 4,563 — surpassing the Turkey campaign. This campaign now appears in 14 languages, with more on the way.

Social media: Our home page now features links to all five of our active social media accounts, including the newest – Bluesky, and we’ve dropped links our inactive Instagram and Mastodon accounts.

Donations: We are waiting on one pledged donation and we are hoping for one more that we applied for. In early January, we will have to chase after major union donors and individuals if we are to stay secure for the next few months.

Germany: The teachers’ union GEW asked us to design a postcard (colour, two-sided) which we did and got the short text translated into German. They will be printing this out and distributing it to everyone attending the union’s conference next month. GEW already made a generous donation to us in 2023.