Inside LabourStart

Campaigns: We now have no campaigns listed on our home page as we have now closed the Kenya and Myanmar campaigns.  Both ended with good results, as did the Egypt campaign which we closed last week.  We added new code to the home page to cope with this situation.  We continue to reach out to unions offering help, and today did a social media post across numerous platforms advertising our availability to help.

Fundraising:  Our appeal a week ago following the good news from Egypt generated just under £1,000 in individual donations.

Correspondents:  We wrote to 6 new correspondents (out of 16) who have not posted any news stories, asking if they need help.

Today in Labour History: We had a problem with one new correspondent not being able to login; this was now fixed.

We haven’t had a number report since November 2023.  With this post we’re returning to monthly reports.  This month’s report does not contain any new information regarding the mailing lists as we have changed the structure of the language segments and won’t report those numbers until next month.

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the first day of November 2023. 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.

 

MAILING LISTS:

The top 10:

English: 84014

French: 7642

German: 5957

Spanish: 5979

Turkish: 4426

Korean: 3321

Italian: 3117

Russian: 2702

Norwegian: 2232

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1536

 

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  293

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 902

Creole:  11

Czech: 61

Danish: 93

Esperanto: 190

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  476

Georgian:  156

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  295

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  186

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 398

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 970

Portuguese: 1292

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 950

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  14

LabourStart Correspondents:  677

LabourStart Translators:  97

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 51

 

FLICKR:

Members:  839-840

Photos:  10212-10233 (after a culling of off-topic photos)

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  130-126

 

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.  Authority for the LabourStart Brasil page has been devolved to a volunteer in Brazil.

LabourStart.org page likes:  unavailable-14071

Global Labour News and Information: 9159-9094

LabourStart UK likes:  unavailable-2137

LabourStart Francophone: 607 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 500

LabourStart Brasil:  552

LabourStart Turkce:  2116

LabourStart TV likes: 443

LabourStart TV follows:  464-454

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 173-17 (new)

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: 2622-2617

Page: 300-274

 

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. Mar 27, 2024. Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU).  296 downloads.
2. April 11, 2024. Interview with Amanda Gearing and Darren Westwood about the strike by Amazon workers in the UK.  273 downloads.
3. May 8, 2024.  Interview with Khaing Zar, trade union leader from Myanmar.

 

X (TWITTER as-was):

A few months ago the Portuguese, Spanish and Canada-EN accounts were  devolved to volunteers in Brazil, Spain and Canada.  As a result changes to tweet frequency and format have been introduced.  This may have had an effect on our numbers.

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  We will have to start 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 Mastodon).

Global English: 38328-40123 [A technical problem with a third-party account manager cost this account in excess of 3k followers last December]

Canada English: 22604-24923 [A technical problem with a third-party account manager cost this account in excess of 2k followers last December]

Global Portuguese: 10413-10754

Global Spanish: 10517-10614

Australia: 10148-10342

USA: 5103-5133

Canada French: 3316-3325

Russian: 49-47

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): 28-27 Placeholder and not yet active.

 

 

Podcasts: We released our interview with Esther Lynch, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), this week. It fairly quickly picked up over 100 downloads. The previous week’s interview, with Khaing Zar, now has over 220 downloads. We have one interview ready to go, and are trying to finalise interviews with trade unionists in Argentina, the US and Europe. We now have a prominent link to the podcasts on all our home pages, in all languages.

Kenya campaign: We’re slowly getting close to 3,000 supporters in what we hope will be the final days of this campaign, as the strike appears to be over. The union has asked us to keep it going a bit longer. The campaign is in 15 languages, and the ones with the largest numbers of supporters are (in order) English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian and Dutch.

New campaigns: We continue to reach out to unions that might need our help. This week, this included IF Metall in Sweden, where the Tesla strike continues, the independent trade unions of Belarus, and the Georgian Trade Union Confederation offering our help in supporting the pro-democracy protests.

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted 1,879 stories to LabourStart in the first 16 days of May, an average of more than 117 per day, a slight decrease compared to the previous week. This month, 36 of our correspondents have been active – we need to grow that.

In the last 9 months, since I last did a regular update to this blog, our volunteer correspondents have posted a LOT of news stories.

Since the beginning of 2024, our correspondents have posted 14,227 stories — averaging 119 news stories per day.  That means that on average, a new labour news story appears on LabourStart every five minutes, 24 hours a day.

The majority of correspondents remain inactive.  In April, there were 47 active correspdents out of 1,084 — over 95% of the correspondents were inactive.

But we have begun regular mailings to the correspondents for whom we have current email addresses (a bit over 600 of them), and 8 of these mailings have gone out so far this year.  As a result, we’ve noted that a number of inactive correspondents have become active in recent weeks.

 

Sorry to have missed a week, but here’s the news from LabourStart in the last two weeks (since 3 February):

New campaign: We launched a new campaign in support of Solidarnosc in Poland – one of their leaders at IKEA has been illegally sacked by the company. This campaign took off very quickly, with over 3,200 supporters in less than 24 hours. It is our first campaign in a few months and it looks like our supporters are keen to help.

Old campaigns: We closed our Marlboro campaign in Turkey (with the permission of DISK). We’ve also closed two very old campaigns in Kazakhstan and Pakistan after several unsuccessful attempts to get news from the unions. In generals our campaigns run for three months, no more. We don’t want ‘stale’ campaigns that no one signs up for on our home page – it sends the wrong message to employers and governments.

Global Solidarity Conference: This is now exactly ten weeks (70 days) away. Over 100 people have already registered and we have a conference website which are updating every day. Please register there if you’ve not yet done so, and please share that link widely. Esther Lynch, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, has agreed to speak at the conference.

Correspondents: We have an ongoing problem with people signing up to be correspondents, and then never posting news. Last week, we fixed a script which shows all new correspondents in the last two years and we identified 13 of them as having never posted a news story — and then wrote to all 13 of them. This will be done regularly. We should not give up on people who may simply not know how, or have forgotten how to login.

Donations: We received a generous donation from EPSU, PSI’s European region.  Donations from our supporters are not has high as we would have liked because the mass mailing asking for donations has only gone out to a small number of lists.   We don’t yet have translations yet for some of our major languages including French, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Turkish.  All of those lists have 1,000 or more subscribers and it would be very helpful if we could get those translations done.

Canada: Pat Bulmer has replaced Derek Blackadder as our coordinator in Canada. Good luck, Pat and to Derek — thanks for decades of fantastic work there.

We lost two good comrades last week, both of whom appeared at LabourStart conferences in recent years — Shane Enright in the UK and Myrtle Witbooi in South Africa.

Shane, who had been on the staff of the ITF, worked for Amnesty International UK and was in charge of the trade unions, where he did exemplary work over years.  Among other things, he arranged for our 2008 LabourStart conference in London to be hosted at the Amnesty headquarters.

Myrtle was the inspiring leader of the domestic workers movement, first in South African and later as President of the International Domestic Workers Federation.  She gave a memorable speech at LabourStart’s 2014 Global Solidarity Conference in Berlin and also spoke at our online International Women’s Day event last year.

May their memory be blessed.

In other news …

Global Solidarity Conference: Last week we had good calls with leaders of two global unions, and there’s a call next week with another. We’re getting very good feedback on the conference. Meanwhile, we now have a logo and a working registration form in English and Georgian, and we have a page that shows all registrants.

Fundraising: We did an appeal to all LabourStart correspondents yesterday — so far, with minimal results.

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

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

 

MAILING LISTS:

The top 10:

English: 83067-82457

French: 7546-7523

German: 5842

Spanish: 5534-5505

Turkish: 4169

Korean: 3320

Italian: 3095

Russian: 2690

Norwegian: 2161

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1502

 

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 901

Creole:  11

Czech: 60

Danish: 93

Esperanto: 186-182

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  472

Georgian:  141

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  293

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  180

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 398

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 842

Portuguese: 1290

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 950

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  668-666

LabourStart Translators:  91

Africa Caucus:  63

 

FLICKR:

Members:  838-839

Photos:  10007-9980

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  122-121

 

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13723-13717

LabourStart.org page follows: 14678

Global Labour News and Information: 8940-8956

LabourStart UK likes:  page unavailable

LabourStart UK follows:  2171

LabourStart Francophone: 607-590 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 500-496

LabourStart Brasil:  553-552

LabourStart Turkce:  2116

LabourStart TV likes: 443-447

LabourStart TV follows:  454

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Nepal:  6 (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: 2603

Page: 242-226

 

TWITTER:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these  accounts with the exception of the Global English account which received occasional attention.

Slow growth and losses, especially the USA account’s continuing decline, can be attributed to users’ response to Musk’s takeover of the site.

Global English: 39076

Canada English: 23251-22962

Portuguese: 11060-11002

Global Spanish: 10468-10319

Australia: 10584-10581

USA: 5267-5300

Canada French: 3046-3061

Russian: 47

Hebrew:  48 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 507 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 335 (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): 22 Placeholder and not yet active.

The final week of 2022 was destined to be a relatively quiet one as many union offices shut down for the holiday.

Nevertheless, we did a few things at LabourStart …

• We sent out an end-of-year mailing to all our correspondents. This encouraged them to contact us if they’re having difficulty logging in to post news, to help recruit new correspondents and to publicise our news page more widely.
• Our mailing lists grew this week as we added 52 more subscribers from the new campaign supporters.
• We did more work to publicise our Belarus campaign across social media. That campaign now has 7,938 supporters — a gain of 50 in the last week. We also shared widely the ITUC statement condemning the sentences handed down to the jailed leaders of the trade union movement in that country. (Unfortunately the ITUC has not yet translated the statement, so it’s only in English.)
• We continued work fixing LabourStart’s back-end. This week that included dealing with a bug in the caption for our photo-of-the-day feature, as well as problems with character encoding on our home page for some Spanish-language stories. We continued work creating new and fixed RSS feeds for a number of countries. Unfortunately, not all of these yet function correctly, but we’re continuing the work.
• We continued this week with discussions with our partners in Georgia in the run-up to our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference at the end of April.

In 2023 we’re looking forward to working harder and smarter to defend workers’ rights and rebuild union power all over the world. Thanks to all of you for all that you do — and happy new year!

There was no report for 1 November so the prior totals are all those current on 1 October.

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

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

 

MAILING LISTS:

The top 10:

English: 82457

French: 7523-7490

German: 5842-5796

Spanish: 5505

Turkish: 4169

Korean: 3320-3311

Italian: 3095-3091

Russian: 2690-2686

Norwegian: 2161-2142

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1502-1492

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 901-899

Creole:  11

Czech: 60

Danish: 93-92

Esperanto: 182-180

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  472-469

Georgian:  141-135

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  293-292

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  180-179

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 398

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 842

Portuguese: 1290-1287

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 950-947

Tagalog: 183-159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 493-487

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  666-665

LabourStart Translators:  91-87

Africa Caucus:  63

 

FLICKR:

Members:  839-837

Photos:  9980-9899

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  121-125

 

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13717-13709

LabourStart.org page follows: 14678-14668

Global Labour News and Information: 8956-9027

LabourStart UK likes:  page unavailable

LabourStart UK follows:  2171

LabourStart Francophone: 590 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 496

LabourStart Brasil:  552-508

LabourStart Turkce:  2116-2126

LabourStart TV likes: 447-441

LabourStart TV follows:  454

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Nepal:  6 (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: 2603-2588

Page: 226-216

 

TWITTER:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these  accounts.  Some accounts’ slow growth and losses, especially the USA account’s decline, can be attributed to users’ response to Musk’s takeover of the site.

Global English: 39076-38225

Canada English: 22962-22601

Portuguese: 11002-10687

Global Spanish: 10319-10064

Australia: 10581-9965

USA: 5300-5435

Canada French: 3061-3114

Russian: 47-46

Hebrew:  48 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 507-508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 335 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341-350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 224-227 (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): 22 Placeholder and not yet active.

 

 

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

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

 

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 73493

French: 7457

German: 5796-5766

Spanish: 5428

Turkish: 4161

Korean: 3308

Italian: 3074

Russian: 2668

Norwegian: 2121

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1476

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 899

Creole:  11

Czech: 63

Danish: 92

Esperanto: 178

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  465

Georgian:  135

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  289

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  178

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 386

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 837

Portuguese: 1287

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 947

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 313

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  662-659

LabourStart Translators:  87

Africa Caucus:  63

 

Flickr:

Members:  837-838

Photos:  10303-10297

 

Facebook Pages/Groups:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13553-13547

LabourStart.org page follows: 14499-14490

Global Labour News and Information: 9011-9013

LabourStart UK likes:  page unavailable-2032

LabourStart UK follows:  page unavailable-2096

LabourStart Francophone: 590 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart Brasil:  502

LabourStart Turkce:  2101-2104

LabourStart TV likes: 443-446

LabourStart TV follows:  455-460

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

 

LinkedIn:

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

Group: 2559-2545

Page: 188-123

 

Twitter:

Sporadic efforts were made to grow the Global English-language, Canadian English-language, Australian, Global Portuguese-language and Global Spanish- feeds.  No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for other accounts.

Global English: 36978-36427

Canada English: 21291-20951

Portuguese: 9606-9193

Global Spanish: 9097-8940

Australia: 9031-8754

USA: 5453-5481

Canada French: 3109-3098

Russian: 46

Hebrew:  48 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508-507 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 335-337 (last tweet 2016)

Indoesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 226 (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): 21 NEW and not yet active.