Inside LabourStart

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists
Total for all lists: 104,515 [104,764]

English: 75,213 [75,686]
French: 5,932 [5,857]
Spanish: 4,356 [4,337]
Italian: 3,879 [3,879]
Turkish: 3,111 [3,112]
German: 2,551 [2,549]
Norwegian: 2,333 [2,328]
Russian: 1,949 [1,948]
Dutch: 781 [740]
Chinese: 629 [553]
Polish: 310 [310]
Portuguese: 243 [243]
Japanese: 209 [ 209]
Hebrew: 208 [207]
Farsi: 201 [201]
Finnish: 186 [186]
Swedish: 185 [186]
Arabic: 184 [183]
Danish: 146 [146]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]
Indonesian 84 [81]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,389 [5,371]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 5,877 [5,715]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,849 [4,824]
Like LabourStart page (French): 245 [240]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 74 [72]

Twitter followers –
English: 8,115 [7,921]

Union group on Flickr: 718 [712]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,114 [1,100]

Website

Correspondents: 1,049 [1,043]
Site visits: 599,459

Book: We completed our campaigns book and published it, and publicized it today.

Campaigns: We closed the Guatemala campaign two weeks ago – still waiting for a report on how things turned out.  The Zimbabwe campaign was closed ten days ago.  The Histadrut has asked us about doing a campaign in support of striking Pelephone workers in Israel.

Newswires: We located the RSS version of the health & safety newswire for Australia which the ACTU had requested.

ActNOW DIY: Did some work on writing the code for this – moving slowly …

Site overhaul: Did a considerable amount of work on the new-look website for 2013.  Coming soon.

International Union Rights: Sales of subs to this were disappointing – we sold just 34 of them (as of 10 days ago).

Today in Labour History: This is now working fairly well, and displaying on our home page.  We have 4 or so people adding content and will soon go public in an attempt to get more correspondents.

Twitter: We are working to get our Spanish language Twitter feed working again and we’re exploring ways to get all our languages working.

Inactive correspondents: We’re building up a list of all those correspondents who are inactive and are beginning to write to each one individually.

With Christmas nearly upon us, work is beginning to slow down – not taking on any new, major projects (and, I hope, no new campaigns) before the new year.

Successful campaigns book: This is now complete, with an introduction by the IUF’s Ron Oswald.  It runs more than 60 pages and we should be able to submit it to Amazon tomorrow (Wednesday) and should have books in hand by the end of the year.  The working title is Campaigning online – and winning: How LabourStart’s ActNOW campaigns are making unions stronger.

Labour newswires: We’ve now set up and tested labour newswires in JavaScript and RSS for the four nations of the UK – England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.  (This was Edd’s first ‘techie’ job, editing and uploading the files.)  We’ll be promoting these to UK union websites, hoping to grow our base of UK sites using our newswires from 20 to 40.  In the process of doing this, we discovered we had no recent stories from Wales, so we’ve added some and are following up with our Welsh correspondents to make them active.

Today in Labour History: Did more work setting this up; a version now appears on the front page of the website, but this is a very rough draft.   (The PHP version will look much nicer.) We have our first additional volunteer to help (from New Zealand), so we’re now a team of 3, but I hope we’ll begin recruiting others soon.

Book of the month: This month we promoted a subscription to International Union Rights; we earn £8 per sub sold, and as of yesterday morning we’d sold 33, so we’ve made £264,  This is more than we made in the previous four months selling books with UCS.  It is less than I’d hoped (I was hoping for at least 50 sales, maybe 100), but this is still much better than we normally do in a month.

Internationalization of campaigns: Edd reviewed how our campaigns appear in different languages and we found a number of places where English was still appearing.  I wrote to all our translators and we’ve made quite a few fixes in the Spanish, French, Norwegian, Indonesia, Vietnamese, and Chinese versions of campaigns.

New correspondents: We’ve added several new ones, including two more from Taiwan, our first active correspondent in the Bulgarian language for some time, and more.

Facebook: I wrote to key correspondents about doing additional versions beyond our English, French and Turkish pages.  Some interest has been shown in creating Indonesian and Chinese pages.

New site design: I spent several hours crafting a new front page for English (which could be the template for other languages).  It’s three columns wide, contains many more images, has a larger font, and features a much simpler navigation.  (That’s a screen shot of where we stand now with this, above.)  I hope to have something to show you all in 2013, but the adventurous among you can ask me for the URL so you can see the work-in-progress for yourself.

Closed campaigns: We’ll be closing the Guatemala campaign after three months today.

The mailing lists grew by a net total of 587, which is not bad. The three largest growths were English (up by 292), French (up 48) and Hebrew (up 18 – a gain of 10%).

Our Facebook page also shot up by 261 new likes this month, a gain of 5%. The Facebook page is growing 7 times as fast as the Facebook group, and today has nearly 1,000 more members.

The largest gain, however, was the growth in followers on Twitter – up by 318 in the last month, and now just under 8,000.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 104,764 [104,177] +587

English: 75,686 [75,394] +292
French: 5,857 [5,809] +48
Spanish: 4,337 [4,329] +8
Italian: 3,879 [3,884]
Turkish: 3,112 [3,111] +1
German: 2,549 [2,538] +11
Norwegian: 2,328 [2,329]
Russian: 1,948 [1,949]
Dutch: 740 [740]
Chinese: 553 [551] +2
Polish: 310 [310]
Portuguese: 243 [244] +1
Japanese: 209 [ 209]
Hebrew: 207 [189] +18
Farsi: 201 [201]
Finnish: 186 [184] +2
Swedish: 186 [186]
Arabic: 183 [177] +6
Danish: 146 [146]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]
Indonesian 81 [76] +5

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,371 [5,342] +29

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 5,715 [5,454] +261
Members of LabourStart group: 4,824 [4,787] +37
Like LabourStart page (French): 240 [237] +3
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 72 [71] +1

Twitter followers –
English: 7,921 [7,603] +318

Union group on Flickr: 712 [709] +3

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,100 [1,054] +46

Website

Correspondents: 1,043 [1,042]

Conference: 183 people are registered so far – 133 from Australia, 50 from overseas. This is an increase of 43 in the last week. The organizing committee continues weekly meetings and preparations; a lot of work is being done to promote the event.

App for smartphones and tablets: I’ve been working very hard on the IUF app (version 2) and a LabourStart app is not far behind, now that I’ve gotten the hang of this.

Fundraising: We’ve written letters to accompany our brochures to over 100 local and regional unions in the UK and over 50 union presidents in the USA.

Campaigns: We launched a new one (Mexico) on Tuesday 6.11 and closed down another (Swaziland) on Friday, 9.11. We gave our Bahrain campaign another push after we learned that one of the two unionists (Jalila) was sent off to prison. As a result, that campaign picked up over 2,000 more supporters and now has just under 10,000 messages sent, making it one of our very largest.

South Africa: One month after my push to existing South African correspondents and an effort to recruit new ones, I can report some good news. Of the last 20 South African labour news stories (posted in the last 2 days), 18 were posted by COSATU and only two by Derek.

Growth was slow this month – though the previous figures are from only 3 weeks ago.  Nevertheless we’re seeing a shrinking of most of our larger mailing lists (as bad addresses are routinely dropped).  What would grow us now is a very large campaign …

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 104,177 [104,296]

English: 75,394 [75,597]
French: 5,809 [5,813]
Spanish: 4,329 [4,338]
Italian: 3,884 [3,872]
Turkish: 3,111 [3,114]
German: 2,538 [2,546]
Norwegian: 2,329 [2,344]
Russian: 1,949 [1,950]
Dutch: 740 [739]
Chinese: 551 [503]
Polish: 310 [308]
Portuguese: 244 [244]
Japanese: 209 [ 209]
Farsi: 201 [201]
Hebrew: 189 [189]
Swedish: 186 [187]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Arabic: 177 [169]
Danish: 146 [150]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]
Indonesian 76 [74]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,342 [5,322]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 5,454 [5,289]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,787 [4,778]
Like LabourStart page (French): 237 [234]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 71 [67]

Twitter followers –
English: 7,603 [7,418]

Union group on Flickr: 709 [701]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,054 [1,037]

Website

Correspondents: 1,042 [1,028]

New office: The Internet was connected on Thursday, 30 August and I’ve been working here ever since. Still need to move 9 sets of bookshelves and about 1,500 books here, as well as some files and a few small pieces of furniture, which will probably be complete this weekend.

UK events & donations from unions: I’ll be attending the TUC congress in Brighton on Monday and the London Labour Film Festival on Thursday, and will distribute LabourStart flyers at both events. Today, I sent out a message to our 8,000+ subscribers in the UK asking for volunteers to help. I also took the opportunity to congratulate the new TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, who opened our 2008 LabourStart conference in London. We’ve gotten recent donations from Unite the Union’s South West region and UCATT (the construction workers union) here in the UK. We’ll be getting a donation from Unison Wales next week following my workshop there.

Conference 2012: I approved a draft document regarding the hiring of someone full time in Australia to help with the conference.

Campaigns:

• Siemens – Should end soon as the vote is today. This is (almost) our largest active campaign at the moment, with 6,772 supporters, after only 12 days online. A special Labo(u)r Day mailing aimed at North Americans helped a bit.
• An “Arab Spring” for the workers?: This may be the theme of these week’s mailing, as we expect to launch a Morocco campaign for the ITF, and to publicize Egypt and Tunisia campaigns for the IUF — all at once.
• Turkish aviation workers campaign: This was closed on Monday — it was one of our largest campaigns.

Correspondents: We have an Arabic language sign up form and it’s nearly complete. Thanks to Erin at the Solidarity Center for help on this, and on recruiting correspondents from the Arab world. On Monday this week I added 10 new correspondents, completely clearing the backlog of such requests.

Hebrew edition: I’ve take a number of steps to improve this, including ensuring that news from outside Israel appears here, getting more correspondents involved, growing the mailing list and the supporters of campaigns, and so on.

Campaigns:

• I cleared the backlog of translations of campaigns and mass mailings.
• Two new campaigns were launched – Swaziland (7 August) and Turkey DHL (8 August).
• I fixed the mycampaigns.cgi script — while it was working OK, it was forcing the system to use the old website addresses and forwarding.
• The Iraq campaign was closed with fewer than 4,000 messages sent.
• We assisted Unite Here and the IUF with promoting their own campaigns this week; in the former case, this also consisted in giving them a lot of constructive criticism about how to campaign globally.
• Two campaigns were given a special boost this week – the RMT campaign in support of London cleaners on Friday when a 48 strike as launched with picketing outside the Olympics venue, and the Hava-Is campaign for Turkish airline workers – because of the new ITF video.  The last of these is our largest campaign at the moment, with well over 8,000 messages sent.

Ukrainian edition: I added 9 correspondents – Masha is co-ordinating this effort.  The interface is already working.

London Labour Film Festival: I’ve been promoting this to our lists and via social media.  LabourStart is getting a quarter-page ad in the festival program.  We are also allowed to distribute our brochure at the door.  The festival takes place in mid-September at the Prince Charles Cinema in central London.

App: We’ve been sent an interesting proposal by a company in Canada offering to do this for us; now under consideration.

Conference 2012: Now little more than 3 months away.  The organizing committee is meeting again next week.  A draft registration form is now ready and a bank account has been set up.  Proposals are being discussed for panels.

Conference 2013: There’s been an offer to host this in Vancouver.  More details soon.

Office in London: I continue to search – have found one very good candidate on Thursday, am looking at another on Monday and will probably decide then.  Packing up of the existing office has already begun.

Fund-raising: We received a substantial one-off donation from the IUF.

Upcoming conferences I’ve been invited to speak at: UNITE Wales in Cardiff in September (“Fifty shades of campaigning“); NASUWT in London in November; Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) in New York City next June.  (I will be contacting some of you for help on organizing a panel for the last of these.)  I also hope to attend the TUC in Brighton in early September.  These are all also opportunities to distribute the LabourStart brochure (1,900+ copies remaining).

Other writing: The current wave of anti-union repression we’re seeing in places like Nigeria and Turkey is the subject of my next regular monthly column for Jungle World.

As promised once we reached the figure of 1,000 correspondents (we’re now up to 1,008), I have looked into how many of those are inactive.  Really inactive.  As in – never posted a single news story.

If we exclude those who became correspondents in 2012, there are 481 such correspondents.  In other words, nearly half of the correspondents have never posted a story.

That’s being generous, because if we look at who’s posting stories on a regular basis – for example, in the first 8 days of August, there were only 50 of us.  So more than 90% of the “active” correspondents were not active in the last 8 days.

In some cases, these are correspondents who have more than one account — and this list is showing the dead account.

Here’s what I propose to do:

One by one, I will write to each of these 481 people and ask them if they need help and if they wish to continue.  (This will be painstaking, because we don’t have a simple system to match up correspondent names to their email addresses.)

I’ll give each one a month to respond.  If they don’t answer or don’t post a story, I’ll close their accounts.