Inside LabourStart

This month we return to reporting mailing list numbers.  Over the next few months we will likely see large changes in the numbers as the problems that resulted from several service provider changes are corrected.

Also this month we start reporting on the Bluesky account which was created mid-month.  Currently we have just one Blusky account, a Global news feed in English, but if the site continues to grow others will be added.

As of this month we will be reporting stories posted.

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:

3166 (105.5 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: 84800-84014

French: 7642

German: 5503-5957

Spanish: 5979

Turkish: 4367-4426

Korean: 3321

Italian: 2819-3117

Russian: 2672-2702

Norwegian: 1996-2232

Romanian:  1730-1771

Dutch: 1437-1536

The others:

Arabic:  763-821

Belarusian:  288-293

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 964-902

Creole:  11

Czech: 58-61

Danish: 79-93

Esperanto: 187-190

Farsi:  164-207

Finnish:  438-476

Georgian:  176-156

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  270-295

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  169-186

Indonesian:  385-460

Japanese: 382-398

Lithuanian:  62-63

Malaysian: 20-21

Polish: 964-970

Portuguese: 1274-1292

Punjabi:  2

Serbian:  97

Sinhalese: 1

Slovak: 15

Swedish: 909-950

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  142-152

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  14

LabourStart Correspondents:  608-677

LabourStart Translators:  104-97

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69-51

Donors:  885

 

FLICKR:

Members:  840

Photos:  10366-10225

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  131

 

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: 9188-9161

LabourStart UK likes:  2k-2.1k, details unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 607 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 495

LabourStart Brasil:  550-547

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV likes: 462-443

LabourStart TV follows:  455-465

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 188-176

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: 2636-2623

Page: 318-305

 

PODCASTS:

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.

PODCASTS:

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. 412 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
2. 315 downloads: Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)
3. 296 downloads: Interview with Judith Kirton-Darling, General Secretary of IndustriAll Europe.

 

BLUESKY:

As an experiment we created a global news in English feed earlier this month.  The account is growing far more quickly than any other of our social media accounts ever did.

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.

Global English-language: 5.9k, details unavailable.

 

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.

We experienced some decline in accounts that usually experience slow growth.  This may be the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Bluesky or Mastodon).

Global English: 37321-38245

Canada English: 21637-22574

Global Portuguese: 10131-10381

Global Spanish: 10835-10503

Australia: 9695-10133

USA: 4805-5035

Canada French: 3199-3313

Russian: 49

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: We’ve given our Georgia campaign a boost in a mass mailing; it is our smallest current campaign with just over 4,100 supporters. We’ve also helped to raise money for the strikers there via the UNI website, and we made a donation on behalf of LabourStart. We’ve been approached about possible campaigns this week in Turkey and Uganda. We also asked about a possible campaign on Iran.

Podcasts: We interviewed one of the Evolution Gaming strikers this week — our first podcast in several weeks.

Mailing lists: In the course of moving back and forth between systems, we lost the country names for a lot of subscribers. But now we’ve written software that reads through our campaign supporters database and updates our mailing list — and tested this on our Canadian supporters. It turns out the 20% of our mailing list are Canadians. This allows us to do targetted mailings based on country.  Our list has grown significantly as well with almost 6,000 new subscribers, all from Canada, being added. We will do this for other countries as well.

Mailings: We did three mailings to our English list this week, which is a lot for us. These included promotions for the winners of the LabourStart CLIFF video award, the Arthur Svensson international prize for trade union rights, and our latest podcast (see above).

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted 1,432 news stories in the first 14 days of November, averaging over 100 per day. Unfortunately, only 32 correspondents were active during this period and we need to find way to reactivate the many inactive ones — and recruit new ones.

 

 

New campaign coming: It looks like we have a new campaign coming very soon, this time from India. It will join the five campaigns we’ve launched in the last six weeks.

Telegram: We’re making a push to grow our number of followers on Telegram, and have widely shared that fact across social media.

Translators: We’re planning an online meeting of all LabourStart’s volunteer translators. You’ve all been sent a link to our Doodle poll so that we can agree the best time to meet — please fill that in if you’ve not yet done so. We’ve just added new volunteers for Bahasa and Serbian language translations.

Podcasts: We’ve added three new features to our podcasts — Fanmail (which allows listeners to send us feedback), Podroll (which allows us to add a list of our podcasting friends), and Dynamic content, which you can hear at the end of every podcast we’ve produced so far.

Home page bug: For a few days, clicking on almost anything on the right side of the home page would take you to our donations page. Contrary to popular belief, this was not intentional and has now been fixed.

Mailing lists: We added new subscribers from our various campaigns to 10 of our lists — the largest group was for the new Serbian language list.

News: In the first 22 days of August, our volunteer correspondents posted on average almost 92 stories per day. The most active correspondents this month were Derek, Eric, Pat, Kyle, and Roy.

Correspondents: We had the first meeting of LabourStart correspondents in a very long time. We had participants from nearly all continents, most of them veteran correspondents, but a couple of brand new ones as well. We will convene these meetings quarterly from now on.

Mailings: We did our first A/B testing of a mass mailing for a very long time, in a mailing promoting the podcasts and campaigns in support of workers at Liberty Steel (Czechia) and Yura (Serbia).

Mailing lists: These grew by 42 this week (last week we added 129). Growth will continue to be slow because it is August and many of our supporters are on holiday, with many union offices closed.

Podcasts: We did a second interview this summer with Judith Kirton-Darling of IndustriAll Europe on the subject of the Liberty Steel campaign (Czechia).

News: In the first half of August (15 days), our volunteer correspondents posted 1,440 news stories — not bad considering how many union websites are closed for the month, with websites not being updated. Our most active correspondents in August were Derek, Eric, Patrick, Kyle, and Pat.

Campaigns: No new campaigns were launched this week and all campaigns are showing slow growth — probably because it’s August and many people are on holiday. I have reminded some of our campaign partners that it is very important to mobilise support in their countries for campaigns that they have requested — which unfortunately does not always happen.

Serbia: In addition to all the usual campaign stuff, I wrote my weekly column for Solidarity on this subject and shared it widely.

Mailing lists: Our lists continue to grow as campaign supporters are added. This week we picked up 129 new subscribers to the list, 70 of them for the English list.

Finances: We now have our first mailing list of donors, featuring people who donated to LabourStart in May and June this year. We will soon begin regular updates to that list.

Correspondents: All correspondents have now been invited to an online meetup on 13 August.

News: Our correspondents have posted 807 news stories in the first 8 days of August, which is extraordinary, considering that so many union websites are not updated this month. The most active correspondents this month have been Derek, Eric, Patrick, Kyle and Pat.

New campaign – Czechia: At the request of IndustriALL and IndustriAll Europe, we launched this campaign on 31.7. By today, it already had 1,721 supporters.

Serbia campaign and podcast: This campaign now appears in quite a few languages and we interviewed a comrade there, sharing this as our podcast. With 3,215 supporters after less than two weeks online, this is already our second largest online campaign. We’ve picked up almost 900 new supporters in the last seven days.

Campaign submission form: The form broke a few months ago — people were submitting campaigns and they were not reaching us. We’ve now migrated the form over to Jotform and this seems to work quite well — and it’s free.

Mailing lists: We finally closed down the Mailchimp account, having migrated all our lists back to Mailjet.

Correspondents: We’ve invited all correspondents to an online meetup later this month; this weekend, we’ll confirm the day and time.

News: On the first day of August our volunteer correspondents posted a whopping 133 news stories. The most active correspondents were Derek, Eric, Roy, Patrick and Pat. Who says August is a quiet month?

Congress of the Education International: We’ve offered complete coverage of this based on stories posted on their website, and publicised this fact widely across social media.

 

 

 

We missed last week’s update, so this report covers the last 14 days.

Campaigns: After a prolonged drought, we now have 4 live campaigns in support of workers in China, Eswatini, Georgia and Serbia. Here are the campaigns and their current total numbers of supporters:

• Georgia: Support striking workers at Evolution Gaming – 1,891
• Serbia: Yura must stop union-busting and negotiate – 2,326
• Eswatini: Recognise the teachers union, respect workers’ rights – 2,611
• China: Release jailed journalists and media workers now – 3,334

The translators have been very busy and most of the campaigns are appearing all the languages. There is a bit of a backlog as many of the translators don’t post the campaigns themselves, and as we transition to a new mailing list system (see below) only one of us is sending out the mailings at the moment.

Two of the campaigns were proposed by unions on the ground and we managed to get the support of European and global union federations.

Other campaigns are also in the pipeline.

In addition, we’ve discovered a new problem with our campaign submission form meaning that for the moment, we’re asking unions to manually submit their campaigns.

Also, the message appearing on our home page when there are no campaigns somehow continue to show for a few days even after campaigns began appearing there again — this has now been fixed.

Mailing lists: As a cost-cutting measure, we are moving from MailChimp to Mailjet, and have already begun doing mailings from the new system. We have migrated 27 of our lists and will migrate the remaining 14 lists this weekend, closing down the MailChimp account early next week. This should save LabourStart something on the order of £8,000 per year.

News: In the first 25 days of July, 38 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,505 news stories — this is a slight improvement compared to what I reported two weeks ago. The most active correspondents in July have been Derek, Patrick, Eric, Kyle and Pat. Next week we will be writing to all correspondents suggesting an online meetup to discuss what’s happening at LabourStart — and to offer help and support to those (the vast majority) who have not been posting news.

Campaigns: We launched our first new campaign since April – China: Release jailed journalists and media workers now. Two more campaigns are in the pipeline, in Serbia and Georgia, and we have reached out to help a union in Bangladesh as well.

Podcasts: We released another podcast this week — an interview with David Edwards, the general secretary of the Education International. Meanwhile, last week’s interview, with Judith Kirton-Darling of IndustriAll Europe, has had more downloads than the previous six podcasts we released.

Mailing lists: After a series of false starts, we have started migrating our lists away from the very expensive MailChimp to MailJet, which we have used before. So far, the process seems relatively painless.  This should save us a considerable amount of money.

T-shirts: While we are unlikely to have t-shirts available in time for the Labour Day holiday in North America, we have made contact with a unionised workers’ coop in the US which can create an online store for us to sell not only t-shirts, but other union swag as well (hats, mugs, etc.) This could help us improve our finances in the future.

News: In the first 12 days of July, our volunteer correspondents posted 1,200 news stories — exactly 100 stories per day. The most active correspondents were Derek Blackadder, Eric Lee, Patrick Craven, Kyle Webster, and Pat Bulmer.

Fundraising: Appeals have gone out to most of our lists and we are getting a good response both from individuals and some unions. According to PayPal, we have taken in £6,825.26 in the last 30 days, which is very good and most of that in the last 7 days. An additional £281.45 came in as bank transfers — we expect more, as quite a few requests for our bank details have come through, especially from Germany. In addition to raising more money, we are cutting costs. We will be migrating from MailChimp to another company, saving about 66% per month.

Interns: We have prepared a (partial) list of all our interns over the last decade or so, and will be reaching out to them. This is a group of talented, committed young people who have already worked with us and in some cases remain engaged already.

Programming:

• Another problem on our home page had been pointed out — when ‘all languages’ was selected for a country news page, it would only show the English story as the top story on the page. This has now been fixed.
• In addition, the home page in English has been tweaked to make the donation link more prominent and to remove the redundant link to our podcasts.
• We heard of a problem with the ‘today in labour history’ content which appears on the bottom of our country pages, but we cannot reproduce the problem.

Campaigns: Still no campaigns have been proposed to us. We looked into doing a campaign on Guatemala where a union leader has been killed and are waiting to hear back. This week, we also wrote to all LabourStart correspondents and translators asking for their help to find new campaigns for us.

News: In the first three weeks of June, 35 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,392 news stories — on average, 114 per day. This is an increase since last week.

Fundraising: Facing a significant fall in our bank accounts, we put out a call for donations, including a mailing to our English list. In the last few days, we raised over £2,800 and are expecting more to come in. Comrades are encouraged to ask their unions to make donations if possible.

Programming: I looked into a complaint about the language selection drop-down menus, but could not reproduce the problem. Meanwhile, our pages showing state/province news have had a bug for years — clicking on ‘More news’ would show news from the country, not the state, and the display of the page was terrible (very small font, etc.) I have now fixed this.

Podcasts: I participated in the regular weekly online meeting of the Labor Podcasting and Radio Network, a US-based group. I learned that the numbers of downloads we are seeing is actually quite good, and will grow. I also learned that often the most successful interviews are with rank-and-file activists, and these sometimes draw larger audiences than those with high-ranking union leaders.

News: In the first two weeks of June, 32 of our volunteer correspondents were active, and they posted a total of 1,503 news stories — averaging 107 stories per day.

Campaigns: We continue to have no new campaigns listed on our home page. We have reached out to a number of unions, but so far nothing.