Inside LabourStart

Yesterday, thanks to the initiative of Silvana, I was invited to address the regular meeting of the Workers Group of the European Economic and Social Committee, a gathering of nearly 100 trade union leaders from all over Europe.  LabourStart was given 30 minutes on the agenda and we followed their adoption of a statement on Greece.  I spoke and showed a PowerPoint presentation (see it here as a PDF), and we distributed LabourStart flyers to all delegates.  There was a lively discussion, and some were quite familiar with our work and praised it.  Others were introduced to LabourStart for the first time and are keen to work with us, including the Lithuanian delegation.

Following the online campaigning course last week in Hattingen, Germany, we’ve heard from two participants — one from Malta who has begun translating our campaigns into Maltese, and one from the European Federation of Journalists who will be working with us on our next campaign.

Our Malaysia campaign continues to grow and is up to 6,459 supporters as of mid-day today.

Thanks to our ongoing ad campaign, we’re nearly up to 10,000 fans on Facebook — we have picked up 247 new fans in the last 8 days, and have just 110 to go.

We’ll be able to revive the Labour Video of the Year competition thanks to our ongoing partnership with the London Labour Film Festival, which takes place this year in September.  More details soon.

The ILO office in Burma has asked permission to translate our book on the Global Labour Movement into Burmese and publish it there.  We’ve agreed.

Finally, I visited this week with a London-based web design company which organized the recent Hack Day at Mozilla which had a trade union theme and at which we made a presentation.  They’re keep to help with with technological issues and have some very interesting ideas (and a wealth of experience).  We’re considering sharing office space with them, so this could be the beginning of a kind of partnership which could help us enormously.

Campaigns:
The China campaign now tops 10,000 messages sent and is our largest active campaign.
A followup mailing was sent to the English list, and this generated 1,600 new supporters from the 5,500 people who opened this message (but didn’t open the first one we sent).  We should consider doing this for our other large language lists.
The Hindi version of this campaign went live this week.
I discussed the possibility of a LabourStart campaign in support of jailed journalists in Turkey with a former president of the National Union of Journalists (UK) — we’d want to do this as a campaign together with the European or International Federation of Journalists.

Internationalization:
We’re still working to get the Portuguese interface working properly for adding news — nearly there. We also now have a transation of the welcome message for new correspondents. Euan has made contact with all our translators and correspondents in Brazil.
We now seem to have a working interface in Sinhalese for our campaigns and have just received the first translation of a campaign — I hope to go live with this very soon.

Books & other publications:
Derek and I have begun looking into printers for the 2016 calendar. Once we know we can do this, and afford this, we’ll begin the work on a photo competition.
With the agreement of my co-author, Jeremy Green, we’ll make our book Firefox OS for Activists, free on the Kindle.  And maybe other books later as well.

Office:
I’m exploring the possibility of re-opening a LabourStart office in London; we’ve had an offer of (free) space. More details next week.

Mailing lists:
This week, I added 558 new subscribers to 16 mailing lists – 401 of them in English.

London Labour Film Festival:
Once again, we’ll be involved in supporting this and promoting it to our supporters in the UK. The festival will take place in the fall.

Donations:
We received a generous donation from the PSEU, a union in Ireland.
I’ve written individually to half a dozen unions in the USA that we have worked with asking for donations.

Things picked up in September even though August was hardly a quiet month for us.

Office: LabourStart is now firmly planted in Muswell Hill as I learn to once again work from home (with some days working in the British Library).

Finances: Our finances have improved a bit this month. We have received a substantial contribution from Fafo in Norway, from the FDHT in Geneva and also many individual donations raised on behalf of Kevin Curran’s marathon run for LabourStart in October ($1,894 so far from 67 contributors). The promotion of Fastmail as a Gmail alternative on 19 September has generated very little income for us. Unison’s National Executive is due to consider a proposal to make a donation to us this month.

Campaigns: We launched five new campaigns in September:

• Canada: Nova Scotia labor law
• Turkey: Union busting at Deva Holdings
• Colombia: Ruben Montoya
• USA: IKEA – play fair with workers
• Colombia: Luis Cardenas / Prosegur

We have been able to announce a victory at Autogrill (Germany) and will soon be able to announce another from the Philippines at NXP. We closed the Swaziland campaign after hearing that the Prime Minister has decided not to strangle trade union leaders. I also closed campaigns in Turkey and Korea after three months; the unions have not gotten back to us with updates.

In addition to promoting our own campaigns, we have helped the following organizations with promotions of their campaigns which we do not host: Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, Australian Council of Trade Unions, IUF, IndustriALL (Thunderclap) and BWI. Most other campaigning organizations will generally not do dedicated mailings to promote other organizations’ campaigns, but we do this regularly.

All our campaigns are now also in Swedish, and this is what now shows on the Swedish home page.

Books: Book sales are just under 5,700, which is very good, and some Amazon payments have started to come in. I continue to work on our next book, which consists of speeches given at the Berlin conference. Derek has been working on a Canadian edition of our Global Labour Movement book. And we’ve reached agreement with Joe Atkins to publish his collection of essays from activists around the world on migrant labour in late 2015.

LabourStart Offline:

• I spent a couple of days at the DGB training centre in Hattingen, Germany doing a course on online campaigning with the European Trade Union Institute.
• Derek has done some courses with Unifor in Canada.
• In November, Espen and I will be in Stockholm meeting with Swedish trade unionists to discuss cooperation (which has already begun).
• In early November, I’ll be in Vienna attending an OSCE conference, which I will cover for Equal Times, and have already written to LabourStart subscribers there suggesting a meeting.
• The FES Media project in Africa has shown interest in cooperating with us and I had a 30 minute phone call with their staffer in Windhoek, Namibia about this.
• Pete Moss, one of our Australian correspondents, visited Indonesia and wrote up a report – see below.

Retreat: We have begun some internal discussions about possibly hosting a LabourStart retreat in Tunis in March 2015. More details coming soon. We are trying out a new online tool called Trello to coordinate this.

Ello: Finally, LabourStart is probably the first labour movement institution with a page on Ello, the new social network.

For details on most of these, see the posts from throughout September on Inside LabourStart.

Goodbye, Lee Valley Technopark.

August was NOT a quiet month for LabourStart.

I guess the big news is that I have completed the move from our Tottenham Hale office to working at home. The office was finally emptied and the keys returned yesterday. This will not only mean a considerable savings (over £6,000 a year) but we will also get back a deposit of £1,470 soon.

That money will help to re-fill our coffers following several months where we spent considerably more than we took in, reducing our reserves by many thousands of pounds. But there’s been good news in the last few days. We were able to raise nearly $600 from UnionBook members to pay for the hosting on Ning for the next year — that’s the full amount we need. The IUF has once again made a substantial donation to us. Norwegian unions will apparently be transferring a good sum to us very soon. And the Geneva-based FDHT is resuming its donations to us conditional upon us continuing with the project to grow LabourStart in the Portuguese-speaking world (more on this soon).

It’s been a very busy month for our campaigns — we closed just one (Gaza, following the agreement to a cease-fire) and launched five new ones:

• Palestine/Israel – against union-busting in Mishur Adumim
• Swaziland – prime minister threatens to strangle trade union leaders
• Belgium/Netherlands – against social dumping at IKEA
• Poland – LOT sacks union leader
• Thailand – Drop the charges against Andy Hall

In addition, I made three improvements to our campaigns – offering an alternative option for some cellphones; a new supporters count for closed campaigns; and a form for translators to submit campaigns. Details on all these appear in a post below.

We ran a promotion offering free versions of our Kindle books for the first 5 days of August. A total of 2,442 books were downloaded — the most popular of which was Dan Gallin’s Solidarity (696 copies). I followed up with over 1,500 people who seemed interested in the books, asking them to post reviews, but with very limited success.

In September, I’ll be helping to teach a course in Hattingen, Germany organized by the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) together with the DGB. This should help introduce LabourStart to union communicators across Europe. This will be followed up in October by my session at a Brussels workshop of ETUI on campaigning. ETUI is also now considering a proposal to host a course dedicated to online campaigning which LabourStart would teach.

Summer is NOT a quiet time at LabourStart …

Campaigns:

• We launched our Gaza Ceasefire campaign on 22 July; it is already our second largest active campaign.
• We launched a campaign in defense of jailed Iranian trade unionist Reza Shahabi on 10 July.
• The Ecuador campaign was closed after 3 months.
• I’ve followed up with the translators for our top 15 languages, trying to make sure that as many campaigns as possible appear in as many languages as possible.
• We did very well with the recent Turkish Georg Fischer campaign and promoted news of our victory to our list, as did with the victory at LATAM in South America.  That’s two victories this month that we contributed to.
• Using a voucher we had from Google for some free advertising, we ran ads supporting out Polish LIDL campaign; they were seen by nearly 24,000 people, but only 103 clicked on the link.

Fund-raising:

• We received a generous donation from Building and Woodworkers International (BWI) and from the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD (TUAC).
• We’ve had an offer from a well-known comrade to run a Marathon in Wales in October to raise funds for LS; more details soon.

Events:

• Our under-utilized Events module just got better — now you can tag an event not only by country, but by state/province as well. You can see the results by checking out our UK/England news page.

News:

• People noticed that visiting our home page took you to a URL that included ‘2013’. This has now been fixed and instead of ‘2013’ it says ‘news’. Most people will not have noticed.

Office:

• I’ve been given warning that we’re to be kicked out of our offices very soon. I visited possible alternatives in Finsbury Park, Bethnal Green and Muswell Hill. I’m leaning towards working from home for a few months, which will save us several thousand pounds.

Speeches:

• LS has been invited to provide a speaker for a Unifor event in Canada.  Derek will probably do it.
• Eric has also been invited by the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) to help teach a course in Germany in September.

New contacts:

• A comrade from a group in France called ReACT came to our offices for a meeting; we discussed many ways of cooperating.
• I had a long meeting in London with the Morocco-based representative of the Solidarity Center; we discussed among other things the possibility of a correspondents’ meeting in the region, maybe in Tunis.
• I followed up with all those who attended the IndustriALL communicators event last month in Italy, at which I spoke, and invited them to cooperate. Two replied, and we picked up a new correspondent in Cambodia as a result.

Books:

• I’ve been encouraging comrades to post reviews of the Dan Gallin book on Amazon; some have already done so.
• Even though book sales haven’t been amazing, for the first two months of our current financial year (June-July), book sales have made up about 10% of LabourStart’s income, though this is unlikely to continue.
• I’ve begun adding reviews to the Gallin book to our page promoting the book — so far, only two.
• I wrote to everyone who requested a review copy (PDF) and asked them to let me know when their reviews appear.
• Thanks to Matt Heaney, the book is now on sale at ver.di’s bookshop, both off- and online.
• I wrote to all 130 people who spoke at our Berlin conference reminding them that we want all their texts for our next book by the end of July.

Photo of the day:

• For those who post these photos (mostly Derek) there’s now an explanation of how to post country-specific ones. If anyone wants to do this, email me and I’ll explain how it’s done.
• The photo of the day is also now available on our mobile edition for the first time.

Enough for now … and now back to work …

Well, it’s been more than a month — but as I was away on holiday from 22-30 June, I wasn’t able to get this done in late June. In future, I’ll try to have this done monthly. Here are just some highlights …

Campaigns: We launched five campaigns in the last six weeks. These were in support of Korean workers (Samsung), Turkish workers (M&T Reklam), and Peruvian and Argentinian workers (LATAM) – which we won. This week we added two more campaigns in support of workers in Poland. We’ve also closed four campaigns in the same period — Georg Fischer (Turkey), Colombia, Aeroflot (Russia), and Total Call (Morocco).

Conference & finances: We had a bit of followup including media coverage, which is documented elsewhere on Inside LabourStart. I’ve now completed all payments relating to the event — and can tell you that the conference was great, but also costly. We need to raise quite a bit to refill our coffers.

Books & other publications: We’ve now sold well over 3,000 books. As Google offered us a very big prize if we started running ads again, we’ve launched a modest campaign to promote our most recent book. I’m working on producing the conference book, Global Crisis, Global Solidarity. It should be ready by late summer. We won’t be doing a 2015 Global Labour Calendar (it’s too late in the year now to get it right, and on time), but we are discussing doing a 2016 version.

Correspondents: We added a number of new ones from the USA, Spain, Israel, Germany, and Poland. One or two complained that they submitted applications which we never saw. I’ve not been able to figure out how that could happen, but instead have put in a warning to people applying to become correspondents that if they don’t hear from us shortly, to email me directly.

About LabourStart: This page hadn’t been updated for years — I gave it a quick refresh last week.

First of the month problem: The French news page, which is now modelled on the English one, was behaving badly, not showing news, on the first of every month. This has now been fixed.

Staff: Our second intern, Tom, is no longer working for us. Gisela, who was on the payroll for a few months building the Berlin conference, is now happily unemployed (for a while at least).

Office: We’ll need to move by the end of October. I’m looking into alternatives now.

I’ve not been updating this regularly enough, but a lot’s been going on over the last 24 days.

Berlin 2014: I just returned from a short visit to Berlin where I met our organizing committee.  The conference opens in a little more than 6 months and so far we’ve got a venue (Ver.di headquarters), an organizing committee, a registration form and a blog full of information — so far, so food.  Please make sure to register if you plan to come.

Kiev 2013: We had a very successful meeting of LabourStart correspondents (and potential correspondents), and our first ever rock concert last week.  See details below.  Followup has included the translation of additional pages into Russian, and signing up some new correspondents.

Firefox OS book: This was published on 24 October; sales so far have not been as high as expected, but we have sold over 140 of them.  If you’ve read the book, please make sure to post reviews to Amazon.  If you don’t have the book, please order a copy now.

The LabourStart Calendar 2014: We need to work harder to promote sales.  We sold 164 last time I reported to you, and in the last 24 days — just 11 more.  Please do what you can to promote this.

Intern: We have hired Tom Harris, who began work 8 days ago.  Edd continues to work with us one day a week.

Campaigns: Last time I reported, we were at 10,100 messages for our most recent campaign (Colombia); in the last 24 days we’ve picked up about 800 more.  We closed our Peru campaign.

Donations: We’ve received substantial donations from the FDHT in Geneva and the RMT union in London.

Upcoming travel: In December, I’ve been invited to speak about online campaigning at a conference in Freiburg, Germany.  In January, Tom and I will go to Berlin for another meeting with the conference organizers.  At the end of that month, I’ll be in Brussels to help the European Trade Union Institute plan a course — initiated by the German national trade union center DGB — on the subject of unions and the net.

Our intern, Edd Mustill, is finishing up nearly a full year at LabourStart and is moving on (though will continue working for us one day a week).  So we’re hiring again – full details here.

Global Solidarity Conference: I had five individual calls with Australians last week, one each day.  I spoke with 4 members of the organizing committee plus Peter Lewis from Essential Media. We took a decision to make this a free conference and to drastically streamline the registration procedure. As a result, we’ve jumped from 5 Australians attending to 33, and a total of just under 50 registrants. We expect many more in the days to come as we finalize the conference agenda and begin to highlight who the guest speakers from overseas will be. I’ve begun weekly mailings the complete Australia / New Zealand list (just under 6,000 addresses) and to all those who’ve registered. In addition, I’ve been doing daily mailings to the 25 or so people on the organizing committee list.  We have less than 35 days to go …

Interns: Today is interview day; I will be interviewing all 4 of the shortlisted candidates as well as giving them a written assignment.

Office: Now largely unpacked, office is looking like a place one can actually work in.

Campaigns: I closed down the RMT campaign. I sent off the biweekly message to all our partners updating them on the status of all campaigns and asking for their help. I also did the monthly reminder to all translators about what they may have missed. I cleared the backlog of translated campaigns and mass mailings. There was a problem with campaign ID numbers, which someone managed to reset to 0, but I fixed this. I also made a small techie change – we had a problem if someone chose to opt out from the mailing list signup in that they wouldn’t be included in the count; this is now fixed. We have been asked to help UNI promote a campaign in support of ING workers in Korea and will do so this week.

UnionBook: The link to UnionJobs, which showed the most recent jobs, has broken so I’ve changed it and moved it to a more prominent location.

Publicity: I and two volunteers distributed 400 LabourStart brochures at the 20 October TUC march and rally in London. This is the first time we have intervened in this way and it went well.

Hebrew edition: My message – in Hebrew – to our list got us one new correspondent. I’ve continued to push our Israeli correspondents to be more involved and to try to feature more news from Palestine and other countries.