Inside LabourStart

Podcasts: This week we interviewed Macarena Grimalt Fernandes from Argentina. In the first 24 hours online, this podcast already had nearly 120 downloads. The five most popular podcasts we’re done so far were: Khaing Zar (Myanmar), Amanda Gearing and Darren Westwood (UK), Sally McManus (Australia), Carolina Dantas (Panama) and Olesia Briazgunova (Ukraine).

Reddit: We have begun sharing some campaigns and news on Reddit in addition to all the other social media platforms we use. These have been seen by, in some cases, many thousands of people; our first post had over 8,000 total views. For a number of reasons, our posts to Reddit are likely to have a wider reach than those to, for example, Twitter.

News: Our volunteer correspondents have posted 2,560 news stories in the first 23 days of May, averaging over 111 per day. This is, again, a small decrease compared to last week, but still a very large number of news stories.

Podcasts: This week we interviewed Esther Lynch, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation — that interview will go live next week. We released the interview we did with Myanmar trade union leader Khaing Zar and in its first day online, it soared to 139 downloads, well on its way to being one of our most popular podcasts.

Kenya campaign: The Kenya campaign, launched at the request of PSI, picked up more than 1,000 new supporters in the last week, and appears in 15 languages — a gain of 8 languages this week. The union has suspended the strike but we’ve been asked to keep the campaign live for a while longer.

Panama campaign: We closed this campaign after more than four months online — it had 5,282 supporters and appeared in 12 languages.

News: In the first 9 days of May, our volunteer correspondents posted 1,082 news stories, or 120 on average every day.

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.

This will be a brief post as nearly all the work this week has focussed on our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference.  Some highlights:

The conference web page now appears in 4 languages – English, Georgian, Russian and Ukrainian.

As of this afternoon, there are 184 registrants from 59 countries — 155 of them from outside Georgia and 29 from Georgia.  We’ve picked up 42 new registrants this week. These numbers will grow in the next week, especially as we begin signing up Georgians in larger numbers.  We are also seeing more people volunteering to run workshops and speak at plenaries.  We hope to have a draft agenda ready in the next week or so.

On Sunday night, Eric Lee will travel to Georgia to spend two weeks working there.

We marked International Women’s Day with posts on social media and with our annual message to correspondents about how to tag stories so that they appear on our Working Women page, which was amended this year to feature Norwegian for the first time.

Meanwhile, our amazing volunteer correspondents continue to do great work sharing labour news from around the world.  They’ve posted 7,524 labour news stories since the start of the year.

More next week …

In Ukraine, workers demonstrate against the new anti-union law.

Ukraine campaign: Following our launch in English last Tuesday, the campaign quickly grew to 5,785 supporters and currently appears in 15 languages with more to come. SumOfUs.org helped by encouraging people who support their petition to also support ours (this is a first, and good news). At our suggestion, they cleared their campaign and text with the unions. The unions in Ukraine are helping to build support, and the campaign also benefitted from a re-tweet by the popular British writer and journalist Paul Mason. We received a small number of hostile messages accusing us, on the one side, of being pro-Putin for daring the criticise the Ukrainian government during war-time, and on the other — for being pro-Zelensky and … well, you can imagine the rest.

Kazakhstan campaign: We are running this for a bit longer as the case remains in the courts. We will do a followup mailing today to our list about this.

Iran campaign: We closed the campaign, announcing that one of the two labour rights defenders has been released. This too will be covered in today’s mailing.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: We’ve scheduled a first meeting of the joint local and international steering committee for later this week. We hope to be able to announce dates shortly.

Mailing lists: Our lists have grown as we add more campaign supporters; last week, we picked up 440 new subscribers, most of them in English but also 37 new subscribers to our Ukrainian list.

Home page: I fixed a long-standing software issue with links to the second country (if there is one) for a news story.

Other software issues: Our programmer has returned and resumed work on fixing our database; she will also be available to help with other projects.

T-shirts:I had a long conversation with No Sweat in the UK and we’re exploring the possibility of doing a second t-shirt very soon. Last year’s campaign was quite successful.

Facebook: Our Group (Global Labour News & Information) has come under attack by spammers – though there is no reason to believe that we’ve been singled out. We’ve been deleting the offensive posts and blocking the spammers, have resumed vetting people who try to join the group, and have posted a pinned message to the group explaining what’s going on.

To-do list: As promised, the list of often longstanding items has been dropping steadily throughout August, from 107 to 75 today. I hope to have this list below 60 by the end of the month.

We’re back to weekly updates.

Campaigns: We launched a new campaign on Friday in support of Ukrainian trade unions.  We’ll be keeping our Kazakhstan campaign live for a bit longer as we wait for news from the union.

T-shirts: We’ve scheduled a call with an organisation in the UK that does union-made t-shirts as a possible new way to produce our shirts this year.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: This week we’ll be writing to the members of the steering group to schedule a first meeting (on Zoom).

Our to-do list:  We’ve had a very long to-do list for some time now, and it was 104 a week ago.  It is now down to just 83 and I hope to continue to reduce it throughout August, aiming to reach 60 by the end of the month.

Software issues: The programmer who assisted us recently is back from holiday this week so we should be able to move forward with more fixes and improvements to the website.

Conference 2023: We have begun work planning our next Global Solidarity Conference — which is long overdue — in Tbilisi.  The Georgian Trade Union Confederation has named its members of the steering committee and we have invited members of the LabourStart Executive to participate as well.  We hope to have the first meeting of the joint committee very soon.

Iran: We have raised workers’ rights cases in Iran with three global union federations — IndustriALL, the ITF and Education International.  EI has requested to be included as a sponsor of our current campaign; we have asked about whether they want a separate campaign for a teacher activist.

News database: The work repairing this continues as we consider moving the whole database to a different web hosting company.  (Support from our current hosts has been non-existent — and they caused the problem in the first place.)

New correspondents: We added three new correspondents last week from Canada (Iran), Germany and Hong Kong (UK).

Campaigns: We had been invited to prepare a campaign in support of a workers’ rights activist in Kenya, but the company caved and agreed to the demands before a campaign could be launched.

Campaigns: We launched three new campaigns in December:

In support of dockworkers in Indonesia, at the request of the ITF. That campaign has 4,405 supporters and appears in 9 languages, with more on the way.
In support of Albanian mine workers at the request of a new and independent union there. That campaign has 5,951 supporters and appears in 13 languages, with more on the way.
In support of Polish retail workers, at the request of UNI. That campaign has 6,944 supporters and appears in 15 languages.

We closed our South Korea campaign after the workers won a clear victory. That was a short campaign and there were 5,377 supporters and the campaign appeared in 12 languages.
We asked if there was a need for a campaign in support a jailed trade union leader in Algeria and were told no. We also asked if LabourStart should be promoting an existing campaign regarding El Salvador but have received no reply.
On 10 December, Human Rights Day, we did a special website (and yes, I did notice that the year is wrong) and mailing (in English only), sharing this widely on our own site and across social media, to promote our existing campaigns.
We had a large number of bouncing target email addresses which were forwarded to us by our web hosts (and in some cases, via Gmail); we have now deleted these from campaigns. These are mostly companies trying to block our messages. We get around this using our petition format.

Correspondents: We amended the message new correspondents receive so that they are now encouraged to have a phone conversation with us early on. This is one of a number of steps we are taking to ensure that correspondents remain active.
We also fixed the ‘show news by correspondent’ script which was not correctly rendering non-Latin characters, as was pointed out by a new Iranian correspondent.
We added new correspondents in Australia and Iran.

Donations: We received a very generous donation from the IUF.

Labour History database: We fixed a problem that had previously blocked users from deleting duplicate entries.

Mailing lists: Today, we added 454 new subscribers from our campaign supporters on 26.12; the largest groups were English (301) and Polish (78). On 16.12, we imported 208 new subscribers, 148 of those for the English list. On 11.12, we imported 665 new subscribers; 266 of these were Korean, 219 English and 112 Polish. That’s a total of 1,327 new subscribers added in the last 15 days.

Media: We have begun work on a media list, with individuals tagged by country and language. Next year we will begin using this list to amplify our campaigns to read a wider audience.

News: We fixed the left column in the new version of the website to show country names in the correct language, where available. (This was already working on the top of the page, and on the bottom.) This may not work for all languages just yet. We also fixed the links on the top of the page and in the left column to go to the country page rather than the old ‘show_news’ page.

Translators: We sent an end-of-year thank you message to all 71 volunteer translators, who’ve translated some 20 campaigns for us throughout 2019.

Brazil: Following the election, we promoted the EI story about Brazil as a top global news story and across social media.

China: We promoted the story about a Chinese firm that forced workers to eat cockroaches and drink urine – as a top global news story, and on social media. Two officials at the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions signed up as LabourStart correspondents.

Germany: We renewed our Twitter account in German, and are posting to it every day. We now follow well over 400 other accounts and some of those have started following back, and as a result, this month we’ve picked up about 20 new followers. It’s a beginning.

India: We shared the ITUC story on erosion of labour laws in India as a top global news story and widely on social media. We also participated in a London meeting of various NGOs and campaigning organisations in the UK in support of workers in the tea plantations of Assam; the organisers of the event publicly thanked LabourStart for promoting their campaign targetting UK tea companies.

Indonesia: We shared the IUF story on Coca-Cola struggle as a top global news story and widely on social media.

Kazakhstan: We launched a new campaign at the request of many global and national unions to protest the repression of trade unionists here. In the first 5 days online, the campaign has over 3,600 supporters and appears in 11 languages.

Philippines: We shared a story about a trade unionist being killed in the Philippines on social media.

Spain: We are in discussion with one of the national trade union centres about a possible campaign, to be launched soon.

Sweden: We resume doing mailings to our Swedish list now that our campaigns are once again being translated into Swedish. We now have 7 volunteer translators for Swedish.

Thailand: We launched a new campaign at the request of IndustriALL to protest the behaviour of Mitsubishi Electric. After 12 days online, the campaign is in 13 languages and has over 5,450 supporters.

Turkey: We shared the ITUC story on the murder of a trade union leader as a top global news story and widely on social media. Our campaign in support of workers at Istanbul’s new airport, launched six weeks ago, is now in 23 languages, and has almost 8,700 supporters.

UK: We had a long meeting at Unite the Union’s headquarters to discuss future joint work. We created a meme in support of RMT strikers on the London Underground and post it on social media. It is very widely shared.

Finances: We thanked TUAC for their generous donation. Amazon has begun to pay us — finally — for books we have published using their CreateSpace platform and Kindle.

Internationalisation: We’re getting our campaigns framework translated into Kurdish and Nepalese and we had a campaign translated for the first time in a long time into Arabic. The Spanish home page now has all country names translated into Spanish, where we are now showing top global news stories, as we do in some other languages. Derek has also begun tweeting in Spanish.

Mailing lists: We added 93 new subscribers, who opted-in from campaigns.

News: We fixed the link that allows correspondents to change their default language and country, and tested it.

I haven’t been doing regular updates to Inside LabourStart — but from this week, I want to start. Here’s a roundup of the last 7 days at LabourStart:

CAMPAIGNS

• We had a problem – for the second time in 4 months – with McAfee blocking access to our campaigns site. After sending them an email (again), they removed the block within 24 hours. I shared the news of this block on social media and to all those (7 subscribers) who complained to me about it.
• We’ve had a proposal from the Australian unions for a campaign on asbestos. It will go live today or tomorrow.
• In one of our shortest campaigns here, we protested against the jailing (again) of leaders of Djibouti’s teachers’ union; they were freed on Monday night.
• With the agreement of our partners in Ukraine, we closed down the campaign in support of Kyiv’s transport workers, which got 8,272 messages sent.
• After 3 months online, we closed down the Brazilian campaign in support of workers at the University of Sao Paulo.
• We did a mini-campaign in the UK to build support for the trade union education programme at Ruskin College in Oxford, at the request of the staffers there who have been made redundant. It’s not hosted on our site, which means it’s not the best way to do it, but we got a large number of people to show their support for Ruskin.
• We helped the IUF promote its campaign in support of Coca-Cola workers in Indonesia – both with a mailing to our list and publicity on the website and on social media.
• I made a small tweak to the campaigns page so that you are now required to choose a country, and you can’t choose the first choice, which is ‘country’. You must choose an actual country.
• I’ve begun regularly weekly reviews of our campaigns and mailings, to see if we’re missing any translations in our most popular languages. The only one which is a persistent problem is German and I’ve written to our friends in Berlin in the hope that we can sort this out.

MAILING LISTS

• We picked up 652 new subscribers this week.
• Because we had almost 137,000 subscribers on our mailings we pay a lot of money every month to MailChimp. We can save some money by not keeping lists there which we no longer need, so I attempted to bring us below the 135,000 threshhold, which would have saved us $300 a year – but unfortunately could not.

NEWS

• We now have the “external ActNOW” working – meaning any correspondent can add a link to an online campaign that’s related to a news story. As of this morning, this has been tested and works everywhere.
• I wrote to all our correspondents telling them about our state/province field, asking them use it where it exists (USA, UK, Australia, South Africa, India, Canada) and if we don’t have it for their country, to let us know and we can add it. We recently learned that in Canada in particular, this is a very popular feature on LabourStart.
• In addition to that, on all our country news pages for those countries named above, there’s now a drop-down menu for the first time listing states, provinces and regions. This should help raise awareness that we have this feature.

PROMOTING LABOURSTART

• The British unions BECTU and USDAW offered to let us have a stall at their upcoming conferences and if we can’t attend, to distribute printed material for us.

BOOKS

• I wrote to all members of the LabourStart executive committee urging people to help get our books, especially the newest one on migrant workers, reviewed on Amazon. This will help boost sales and I encourage everyone reading this to help out.

DONATIONS

• Finally, we received pledges of donations from TUAC, UNI and BWI. I am sending out reminders to all global union bodies which regularly donate to us, and so far they are all responding affirmatively.