Inside LabourStart

New campaign – Esmail Abdi – hunger strike:
This campaign went live about a week ago is already doing well, with over 6,000 supporters, and was translated into a dozen languages.
I sent out a reminder to the 71,354 people on our English list who didn’t open the message sent out a week ago.

Campaigns in the pipeline:
We are in discussions with a Canadian union on a major campaign.
UGT Spain is talking with us about a campaign focussing on workers facing jail.
A US union has also asked for a possible campaign with a long-running dispute.
We were given a campaign by a union in Turkey last week but have been asked to hold off on this for a bit.

Mailing lists:
We picked up 317 new subscribers, nearly all of those for the English list.

Fundraising drive:
We did the annual fundraising drive, which raised £2,500 in the first 48 hours. The mailing is translated into a number of languages – but some key ones still remain.

New correspondents:
We have new correspondents in Iran and the Netherlands.

Books:
We’ve now sent out review copies of our migrant workers book to 33 publications — I hope this will generate some reviews and raise awareness of the book.
We continue to have problems with CreateSpace, the Amazon subsidiary that prints and sells the books, and have continued complaining and demanding that they sort out the payments which are owed to us. They are currently looking into what the problem is.

New LabourStart flyer:
A new LabourStart brochure is in the works, our first since 2014. The English version should be ready in a few days.

Privacy issue – resolved:
After repeated requests to Google to re-crawl our site, they have finally done so. As a result, people searching for their own email addresses on Google should not find them listed on an internal LabourStart campaign, as was the case for a few weeks.

LinkedIn:
From what I can tell, we are no longer able to mail to our group on LinkedIn, which is a pity.

Publicity on social media:
Publicised China Labor Watch statement on Ivanka Trump on Facebook and Twitter.
Promoted the ITUC statement on the new South Korean president.
Publicised our extensive coverage of the Histadrut election in Israel.

We launched one completely new campaign this week (Somalia), went live with another (Madagascar) and continued work promoting and translating other recent campaigns.

Our asbestos campaign grew from 5,728 to 6,530 supporters this week, a gain of 802.

Our Kazakhstan campaign grew even faster than that, going from 4,469 to 6,256, a gain of 1,787 — that’s a growth of 40% in one week for this campaign, which is encouraging. We attempted to give that campaign a big boost in French by tweeting an appeal to all 4 left-wing candidates in the French election, but to no avail. Nevertheless, we should consider tweeting at prominent individuals on the left and in the labour movement in future to boost campaigns.

Early in the week we launched our Madagascar dockers campaign which grew very quickly to 5,348 supporters.

And today we launched our Somalia campaign in English and Arabic, with a commitment to do our first-ever campaign in Somali as well (17 million speakers worldwide).

We asked for permission to close down the DNO Yemen campaign after 3 months, but were asked to hold off for a bit. We have a number of older campaigns on hold in this way.

We continue to promote campaigns and appeals from other organisations. These included a BWI campaign to protest redundancies in Spain, protesting the closure of labour web portal sendika.org in Turkey (could eventually be a LabourStart campaign), and a possible campaign in Morocco — we are waiting for them to clear this with their global union.

Our mailing lists continue to grow; this week we added 268 new subscribers in 22 languages, which is 50% more than we added last week, with a relatively large contingent in Russian.

We’ve been alerted to a problem with our share on Twitter link, which works fine on the web and on Android devices, but not on iOS devices. We need to figure out why.

We did a considerable amount of work continuing to internationalise the site this week. I made a number of fixes to both our news and campaigns sites in Esperanto, and drafted a message to be sent to Esperantists and their organisations around the world. This mailing list, by no means our smallest, has our highest response rate for campaigns, and a much larger list means many more supporters for our campaigns.

Kirill pointed out problems with sharing a campaign by email in Russian and these have all now been fixed.

We did the third mailing so far this year to LabourStart’s more than 600 correspondents. This time we discussed May Day, the new external campaigns feature, and helping us to fill in a black hole when one of our most active correspondents goes on holiday next month.

And finally, another global union, UNI, has made a generous donation to LabourStart this week.

Campaigns: We launched three new ones – on asbestos (a global campaign), Madagascar, and Kazakhstan. Only the first has gone live with full publicity and translations as there are some issues still to be resolved with the latter two; we’ve gotten over 2,600 messages sent since yesterday evening in support of the asbestos ban. I closed a UK-only campaign launched on behalf of BFAWU (the bakers) — I’m pleased to report that we won this. The previous Kazakhstan campaign was also closed this week.

Mailing list: Without a new campaign, the list barely grows — we picked up just 78 new subscribers this week, most of them for the French list. Matt and Mark in Berlin have offered to join the team posting messages, so our German language mailings should go out quicker.

News: We added one new correspondent from Yemen and one from Brazil.

UK: We’ve set up a LabourStart UK Facebook page and will start promoting it next week; Warren is helping by posting news stories to it. After getting a few complaints about the mailing we did last week in support of Ruskin College, I received a clarification from the person who asked us to do it and shared that with everyone who wrote in.

Website redesign: I followed up with a London-based worker coop which has offered to help us with this; we’ll probably meet up in May to discuss next steps.

Outreach: I reached out to a major Irish trade and we had a phone call to discuss ways we can help them and work together. I also had a long conversation with a US based campaigning group and we’re looking for ways we can work together.

Social media: We used Facebook and Twitter this week to highlight a number of important issues including the ITUC’s condemnation of Assad’s chemical attack on his own people, a call for a global ban on modern slavery, and an expose of the use of North Korean slaves in Russia — all this in addition to ongoing Facebook posts and tweets which Derek has been coordinating.

Please note that this report covers a three month period – the last report covered six months. The first number is the current total, the second one is our previous total.

We’ve added 14 smaller languages in addition to the top 20 this time. Four of these have over 100 subscribers.

Mailing lists

English: 86,871- 86,697
French: 9,032- 8,929
German: 6,252 – 5,997
Spanish: 5,527 – 5,525
Turkish: 4,248 – 4,314
Korean: 4,171 – 4,170
Italian: 3,983 – 4,021
Norwegian: 2,772 – 2,681
Russian: 2,564 – 2,444
Dutch: 1,707 – 1,720

Swedish: 1,243 – 1,242
Chinese: 1,077 – 1,112
Portuguese: 848 – 647
Polish: 798 – 798
Finnish: 643 – 638
Japanese: 518 – 518
Arabic: 509 – 418
Indonesian: 346 – 346
Hebrew: 280 – 284
Tagalog: 254 – 254
Farsi: 232 – 231

Esperanto: 155
Hungarian: 149
Ukrainian: 138
Danish: 102
Czech: 81
Thai: 67
Greek: 58
Hindi: 41
Romanian: 41
Slovakian: 20
Bulgarian: 18
Vietnamese: 13
Creole: 12
Sinhalese: 1

Facebook:

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 12,112 – 11,990
Members of LabourStart group: 8,416 – 8,388
Friends of LabourStart Brasil: 3,406 – 3,232
Like LabourStart page (French): 553 – 551
Like LabourStart page (German): 485 – 478
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 181- 177
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 158 – 155
Members of LabourStart Vostok (Russian): 90 – 89

Twitter

English: 17,229 – 16,922
Canada English: 6,638 – 6,404
Canada French: 1,726 – 1,633
USA: 662- 639
Italian: 492 – 475
Swedish: 376- 374
Indonesia: 366 – 365
French: 230 – 225
Portuguese: 223 – 191
German: 94 – 92
Spanish: 70 – 71
Japanese: 21 – 21
Russian: 18 – 18

Website traffic

LabourStart.org (news)

Unique users 42,120 – 41,506

Top countries (by sessions):

USA 20% – 23%
Canada 15% – 14%
UK 16% – 15%
India 5% – 6%
Australia 5% – 5%

Most popular pages – page views:

Home page – English 26,770 – 51,618
USA – English 7,630 – 21,045
Canada – English 5,354- 10,210
India 5,097 – 11,069
Home page – Norwegian 2,175- 4,091

LabourStartCampaigns.net (campaigns)

Unique users 43,979 – 56,270

Top countries (by sessions):

UK 18% – 15%
USA 13% – 13%
Canada 11% – 9%
Germany 7% – 5%
Belgium 4% – 5%

Most popular pages – page views:

Kazakhstan: Save the independent trade union centre from forced dissolution – 11,977
Bangladesh: Release arrested garment union leaders now! – 11,667
Yemen: DNO must pay its workers – 9,480
Nigeria: Government must intervene to support sacked dockworkers – 7,179
Hungary: Public sector union leaders sacked in unprecedented attack – 7,063

Linked In

LabourStart group: 2,052 – 2,044

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 825- 821

Website

Correspondents: 856 – 845

Some highlights:

* Note that this report covers a six month period as we missed our September report.
* Good news on traffic to the website – very big gains in traffic to both the news and campaigns sites. Over 61,000 unique visitors to news site was a gain of nearly 50% compared to the first half of the year.There was an even bigger gain for the campaigns site.
* There’s been a very significant growth in interest in our news site in India.
* While most of the mailing lists either stayed the same size or shrunk, the Portuguese language list stands out for having grown by 36% in the last half year. Also our Brasilian presence on Facebook has shown enormous growth.
* Once again, the Canadian Twitter feeds in English and French have grown dramatically, while the USA Twitter following remains quite small.
* Of the five top campaigns in this half year, two came from the International Federation of Journalists (our first campaigns ever with the IFJ) and three of the five are currently active campaigns.

Mailing lists

English: 86,697 – 88,242
French: 8,929 – 8,791
German: 5,997 – 6,021
Spanish: 5,525 – 5,531
Turkish: 4,314 – 4,268
Korean: 4,170 – 3,965
Italian: 4,021 – 4,044
Norwegian: 2,681 – 2,701
Russian: 2,444 – 2,449
Dutch: 1,720 – 1,774

Swedish: 1,242 – 1,235
Chinese: 1,112 – 1,112
Polish: 798 – 798
Portuguese: 647 – 475
Finnish: 638 – 687
Japanese: 518 – 518
Arabic: 418 – 478
Indonesian: 346 – 346
Hebrew: 284 – 296
Tagalog: 254 – 254
Farsi: 231 – 242

UnionBook

UnionBook was closed in 2016.

Linked In

LabourStart group: 2,044 – 2,012

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 821 – 806

Website

Correspondents: 845 – 826

LabourStart.org (news)

Unique users – 61,279 – 41,506

Top countries (by sessions):

USA 23% – 23%
Canada 14% – 15%
UK 13% – 12%
India – 6%
Australia 5% – 5%

Most popular pages – page views:

Home page – English 51,618 – 34,337
USA – English 21,045 – 8,294
Canada – English 10,210 – 6,297
India – 11,069 – 1,807
Home page – Norwegian 4,091 – 2,746

LabourStartCampaigns.net (campaigns)

Unique users – 56,270 – 37,851

Top countries (by sessions):

UK 15% – 16%
USA 13% – 14%
Canada 9% – 10%
Germany 5% – 7%
Belgium 5%

Most popular pages – page views:

South Korea: Release jailed trade unionists, respect workers’ rights – 8,969
Iran: Freedom for teacher union leader Esmail Abdi – 8,940
Korea: Don’t let Han’s death be in vain – 8,659
Turkey: Press freedom is essential for democracy, set journalism free! – 8,651
AFP: Demand fair terms for freelance photographers – 8,153

Twitter

English: 16,922 – 16,188
Canada English: 6,404 – 5,661
Canada French: 1,633 – 1,071
USA: 639 – 608
Italian: 475 – 458
Indonesia: 365 – 368
Swedish: 374 – 356
French: 230 – 225
Portuguese: 191 – 92
German: 92 – 91
Spanish: 71 – 73
Japanese: 21 – 22
Russian: 18 – 18

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 11,990 – 10,528
Members of LabourStart group: 8,388 – 8,521
Friends of LabourStart Brasil: 3,232 – 1,681
Like LabourStart page (French): 551 – 535
Like LabourStart page (German): 478 – 472
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 177 – 175
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 155 – 155
Members of LabourStart Vostok (Russian): 89 – 109

Some highlights:

* Significant growth to the English and Turkish mailing lists.
* Slow growth on social networks except for the LabourStart Brasil Facebook presence, which grew by nearly 50% this quarter.
* 24 new correspondents – on average, 2 new ones per week.
* Significant growth in traffic to our news website with 10,000 more unique users than in the previous quarter.
* Our campaigns site also experienced significant growth, with nearly 38,000 unique visitors in this period.
* Downloads of our Android app have slowed dramatically, and fewer people are using it than in the past.

Mailing lists

English: 88,242 – 85,445
French: 8,791 – 8,438
German: 6,021 – 5,870
Spanish: 5,531 – 5,455
Turkish: 4,268 – 3,722
Italian: 4,044 – 4,029
Korean: 3,965 – 3,965
Norwegian: 2,701 – 2,736
Russian: 2,449 – 2,438
Dutch: 1,774 – 1,774

Swedish: 1,235 – 1,255
Chinese: 1,112 – 1,112
Polish: 798 – 798
Finnish: 687 – 687
Japanese: 518 – 518
Arabic: 478 – 450
Portuguese: 475 – 468
Indonesian: 346 – 346
Hebrew: 296 – 286
Tagalog: 254 – 254
Farsi: 242 – 242

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 16,188 – 15,817
Canada English: 5,661 – 5,207
Canada French: 1,071 – 956
USA: 608 – 582
Italian: 458 – 448
Indonesia: 368 – 368
Swedish: 356 – 345
French: 225 – 226
Portuguese: 92 – 71
German: 91 – 90
Spanish: 73 – 74
Japanese: 22 – 22
Russian: 18 – 18

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 10,528 – 10,319
Members of LabourStart group: 8,521 – 8,572
Friends of LabourStart Brasil: 1,681 – 1,198
Like LabourStart page (French): 535 – 500
Like LabourStart page (German): 472 – 462
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 175 – 168
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 155 – 151
Members of LabourStart Vostok [Russian]: 109 – 89

UnionBook

Members: 5,929 – 5,915

LinkedIn

LabourStart group: 2,012 – 1,996

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 806 – 802

Website

Correspondents: 826 – 802

LabourStart.org (news)

Unique users – 41,506 – 31,026

Top countries (by sessions):

USA 23% – 25%
Canada 15% – 16%
UK 12% – 11%
Australia 5% – 5%
France – 4%

Most popular pages – page views:

Home page – English 34,337 – 37,618
USA – English 8,294 – 2,788
Canada – English 6,297 – 2,129
India – 3,853 – 1,098
Home page – Norwegian 2,746 – 2,309

LabourStartCampaigns.net (campaigns)

Unique users – 37,851 – 21,763

Top countries (by sessions):

UK 16% – 15%
USA 14% – 14%
Germany 7% – 10%
Canada 10% – 9%
France 5%

Most popular pages – page views:

Uzbekistan: Defend human rights activist Uktam Pardaev – 12,011
Colombia: Free academic and unionist Miguel Ángel Beltrán – 10,780
Peru: Union organizer expelled – 8,497
Gambia: Justice for Sheriff Diba – 8,233
Turkey: Support the union members fighting to save the forests of Cerattepe – 4,939

Android app downloads (totals)

First number is current, second number is total installs. The numbers in brackets are from the previous quarter.

English: 370 / 795 [387 / 757]
Norwegian: 41 / 49 [38 / 48]
Esperanto: 25 / 105 [33 / 99]

Total: 436 [458] current installs

Books

Work is being done on our book on migrant labour which we hope to launch in Toronto. We have a cover and the inside pages are nearly done.

Campaigns

I’ve asked the KCTU and HKCTU for permission to close down the Korea and China campaigns, both of which have been running for a long time.
A new campaign in support of Turkish union GIDA-IS is about to go live.
The campaign submission page has a new field for videos so these can be incorporated into future campaigns.
I did the monthly review of translations into our major languages and identified some problems, especially with German campaigns.

Correspondents

Weekly mailings to all correspondents continue. One focussed on the use of states and regions in news stories; the other encouraged the 90% who’ve been inactive to get active.

Donations

We received a large donation from a branch of Unite the Union in the UK. The Education International and UNI have also made substantial donations to us.

News

Mahesh pointed out a problem with tweeting a news story with a apostrophe in the title.

Radio

I have submitted weekly programmes to WINS on the terrorist attacks in Brussels and the new crackdown on independent unions in Egypt.

Upcoming

On Thursday, I’ll be speaking on a panel with a leader of Unite the Union and Amnesty International’s Shane Enright on corporate campaigning, in London.

Campaigns:

At the request of the Education International, we launched a campaign in defense of a jailed teacher trade unionist.
The ITF requested and we launched a campaign protesting the killing in custody of a Gambian trade union leader.
A Turkish union, GIDA-IS, has asked us to do a campaign which we will launch shortly.

Conference:

We now have a draft agenda ready, a logo, a WordPress blog is being created, and we have hired an intern to work with us on this (Angela).

Correspondents:

I resumed weekly mailings to all our 600+ correspondents. Each week, they get news and ideas how they can be more active or use LabourStart better. Focusses of recent mailings have included encouraging them to get their unions to issue statements in support of our campaigns, International Women’s Day, and how to link campaigns to news.
I added at least 16 new correspondents in the last two weeks — there had been a backlog dating back to January.

Mailing lists:

We’ve added hundreds of new people to our lists due to the recent campaigns.

Newswires:

I fixed the script that builds the JavaScript newswire, adidng a requirement that stories be in English, because there are now Russian and French priority 1 news stories.
It also turned out that there was an old, broken link to our campaigns newswire on the site, but this has now been fixed.

Outreach:

I’ve been invited to speak on a panel on 31 March in London, together with Shane Enright from Amnesty International, on campaigning. The panel is hosted by the Ethical Trading Initiative.
I will also be representing LabourStart at an event to be held in mid-April at the House of Lords in London; details to follow.

Ratify the Protocol:

We continue offering support to this important initiative from the ITUC (against modern slavery) and this month did a mailing to our Italian list after our volunteer translators translated the ITUC’s campaign page.

WINS Working World – Labor Radio:

I continue with recording weekly programs — the most recent one was on the Palestinian teachers’ strike. These can be found here: http://www.laborradio.org/?zone=/unionactive/view_page.cfm&page=The20Working20World

Some highlights:

• Nearly 900 new subscribers on our Korean list
• Hundreds of new followers on Twitter, on several lists
• The emergence of major new presence on Facebook for LabourStart Brasil
• Big gains in traffic to both the news and campaigning websites

The second number is the previous quarter (if we have it); some lines are particularly interesting and have been highlighted in green.

Mailing lists

English: 85,445 – 85,588
French: 8,438 – 8,325
German: 5,870 – 5,785
Spanish: 5,455 – 5,448
Italian: 4,029 – 3,970
Korean: 3,965 – 3,068
Turkish: 3,722 – 3,719
Norwegian: 2,736 – 2,782
Russian: 2,438 – 2,433
Dutch: 1,774 – 1,774

Swedish: 1,255 – 1,256
Chinese: 1,112 – 1,103
Polish: 798 – 793
Finnish: 687 – 687
Japanese: 518 – 488
Portuguese: 468 – 416
Arabic: 450 – 463
Indonesian: 346 – 346
Hebrew: 286 – 282
Tagalog: 254 – 254
Farsi: 242 – 242

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 15,817 – 15,395
Canada English: 5,207 – 4,962
Canada French: 956 – 876
USA: 582 – 563
Italian: 448 – 421
Indonesia: 368 – 360
Swedish: 345 – 306
French: 226 – 229
German: 90 – 90
Spanish: 74 – 76
Portuguese: 71 – 47
Japanese: 22 – 21
Russian: 18 – 18

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 10,319 – 10,177
Members of LabourStart group: 8,572 – 8,611
Friends of LabourStart Brasil: 1,198
Like LabourStart page (French): 500 – 483
Like LabourStart page (German): 462 – 447
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 168 – 169
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 151 – 148
Members of LabourStart Vostok [Russian]: 89 – 82

UnionBook

Members: 5,915 – 5,909

LinkedIn

LabourStart group: 1,996 – 1,970

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 802 – 791

Website

Correspondents: 802 – 798

LabourStart.org (news)

Unique users – 31,026 – 22,366

Top countries (by sessions):

USA 25% – 29%
Canada 16% – 15%
UK 11% – 9%
Australia 5% – 5%
France 4%

Most popular pages – page views:

Home page – English 37,618 – 41,764
USA – English 13,089 – 13,941
Canada – English 7,616 – 6,294
India – 2,444
Home page – Norwegian – 2,309 – 2,807

LabourStartCampaigns.net (campaigns)

Unique users – 39,304 – 35,723

Top countries (by sessions):

UK 15% – 17%
USA 13% – 14%
Canada 12% – 16%
Germany 6% – 5%
Belgium 5%

Most popular pages – page views:

Egypt: Torture and murder of Giulio Regeni – 13,011
China: Free jailed labour activists, stop suppressing labour organizations! – 6,692
Israel/China: Stop governments’ deal to import bonded workers – 6,324
Djibouti: Teacher trade unionist sentenced to prison – 6,213
Iran: Detained teacher unionist on hunger strike – 5,166

Android app downloads (totals)

First number is current, second number is total installs. The numbers in brackets are from the previous quarter.

English: 387 / 757 [408 / 721]
Norwegian: 38 / 48 [37 / 43]
Esperanto: 33 / 99 [30 / 88]

Total: 458 current installs [475]

I had wanted these to be fortnightly reports — but it’s hard to keep that going with so much happening. So, apologies for the delay. Here’s what’s happened in the last five weeks:

CAMPAIGNS

• We asked KCTU if we can close down their 3-month-old campaign; they’ve asked us to keep it going and we will.
• Launched two new campaigns on one day (Iran and Morocco), both concerning individuals we’d already campaigned for in the past.
• We closed three campaigns — Mastepan (Estonia), Nermin (Libya) and Ewado (Djibouti); we reported on both in the mass mailing that went out today.  We also heard very positive news about a campaign we did with WAC in defense of a Palestinian trade union activist.
• We launched a very large campaign demanding justice for Giulio Regeni. This came at the suggestion of our Italian comrades, and was quickly followed by support from the IUF and a positive statement also from the ITUC.  This campaign soared to 10,000 messages very quickly and continues to grow.
• We continued to support the ITUC’s Ratify the Protocol campaign.

RADIO

We’re now submitting weekly 2 1/2 minute reports to the Workers Independent News Service (WINS) in the US. This is in addition to our ongoing cooperation with Radio Labour, based in Canada.

FINANCES

We received a generous donation from Building and Woodworkers International.

EVENTS

I spoke at a meeting of communications staffers of European unions in Gdansk, Poland last week.

CORRESPONDENTS

We’ve resumed regular mailings to correspondents, which will take place every week — after a gap of nearly 10 months.

BOOKS

The complete manuscript for the next LabourStart book, The Strangers Among Us, has been received and we’re currently formatting it. We hope to have a book launch event at our conference in Toronto.

CONFERENCE

Speaking of which — we have a large number of workshop proposals and 371 people signed up to attend; there’s an organizing committee and an intern hired, and we’ll soon have an agenda.

PUBLICITY

At the suggestion of the British TUC, we submitted a nomination form for the SMK Campaigners Awards; they will decide by the end of February and their ceremony in the House of Lords will take place on 13 April.

TRANSLATIONS

We need a new Spanish translator as our comrade David has fallen ill; we got several dozen volunteers for the job.