Inside LabourStart

Calendar: Sale of our LabourStart Calendar for 2014 have stalled — we only sold 18 in the last 6 days (of those, 8 were in Canada, 5 in Australia, 3 in the UK and 2 in the USA).  I’ve already done two rounds of publicity and today will be mailing to nearly 500 state federations of labor and central labor councils in the USA in an attempt to boost sales there.

Campaigns:

• August was an exceptionally slow month for us, so 5 days ago I wrote to all our campaign partners — GUFs and others — asking if anyone needed help.  We got answers from a number of them an expect to launch several new campaigns in the next couple of weeks.
• Edd and I met with a leader of the UN staff union and they have been facing a brutal attack on workers’ rights from the Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, and will probably be needing a campaign from us in the next few days.
• We closed down the Philippines campaign one month early (see below) and the GE Erie campaign one month late (at the request of the union).
• We did a special mailing to our Canadian subscribers boosting a number of campaigns there (not all of these were hosted by LabourStart).

Intern: As I reported below, Edd is leaving us at the end of this month (though will continue working one day a week for LabourStart) and we’ve begun the process of recruiting a replacement.

News:

• The biggest improvement, described below, is that now you can get beyond the first 50 news stories on any of our country pages.   (This will soon work on our home pages in the different languages as well.)
• I’ve also fixed a problem with links to the country names that were appearing on the home page in English — the first time the name appeared, the link would take you to our new, correct country news page, but the second appearance of the country name still took you to an old page.
• With so much coverage of the British TUC conference last week, we did a special mailing to our UK list promoting the news page.  It’s very important that we continue to draw attention to our news service, as many of the people on our mailing list are familiar with our campaigns — but not with the news we provide.

Correspondents: 

• As reported below, a correspondent can now change their default language and country — either temporarily or permanently.  This caused a small problem for senior correspondents, as Derek discovered, but this has now been fixed.
• We’ve been struggling to make sure that we have current email addresses for all the correspondents and Edd has nearly completed this task.
• This week, I resumed weekly mailings to correspondents and I intend to keep doing this.

Internationalization:

• Our failure to sustain LabourStart news in any Nordic language except Norwegian has been with us for some time.  This week, I wrote to all our subscribers on the English list from Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden and have received responses from 10 of them — at least one has volunteered to be a correspondent, others have already contact their national trade union centres in the hope of growing interest in LabourStart.
• Our French home page was the last one to be converted to our new format and this is now complete.

Kiev 2013: There will be a meeting of LabourStart correspondents from Russia, Ukraine and Georgia (and other countries?) in Kiev at the beginning of November.  Masha has drafted an invitation letter which I’ve read and approved, and Edd has found email addresses for all our correspondents from the region who have been invited.  I will be attending myself.

Berlin 2014: I’ve fixed a meeting at the ITUC in Brussels for two weeks from today to discuss how our conference ties in with theirs.  They’ve been exceptionally cooperative and this is hugely important for the success of our global solidarity conference.

Small screen version of LabourStart: Edd’s been working on a version of the site that will automatically appear when you view it on a smartphone, as we’ve done with campaigns.  This is nearly ready.

Daily tech tips for trade unionists: I  wrote ten of these which appeared over the last couple of weeks and got some nice and interesting feedback.  Would be interested to know if comrades would like this to continue.  Meanwhile, I’m pausing the effort.

If you visit any of our country pages (e.g., the USA), you’ll now see at the very bottom, after the last story, a link for more news.
If you click on it, it will show you the next 50 stories, and then after that, another 50 stories, and so on.
At the moment this is only working on the country pages, but tomorrow I’ll aim to get it working on the home page in all languages as well.
We’ll also be adding Search once again to the site, but this new function — which took quite some time to get right — is a huge improvement over where we stood until very recently.

Calendar: Our first-ever wall calendar has appeared and it’s beautiful.  So far this week, we’ve sold 97 of them.  Have you ordered yours yet?

Campaigns:  Our campaign demanding the release of jailed Canadian John Greyson, held by the Egyptian police, went global and was publicized in a mailing.  It’s now up to 3,845 messages sent. Tomorrow we’re meeting with an activist from the UN staff unions, here to discuss efforts to weaken trade unions for staff at the global body — a possible campaign.

Berlin 2014: Last weekend I was able to meet with another member of the Berlin committee and discuss many of the issues around our upcoming conference.  I booked flights for my visit to Berlin next month where I’ll meet the whole committee and help take planning forward.

Photo of the day: I made changes in how we do the photo of the day feature on the front page of LabourStart in part to deal with problems that came up with our use of CloudFlare to cache our site.  But it’s also allowed us to do two things we hadn’t planned on — to pre-load a photo for a date in the future, and to show an archive of all photos we’ve had recently.

Correspondents: Every correspondent is given a default language and country, and while this is usually good enough, sometimes it needs to change.  Correspondents themselves now have the ability to do this after they’ve logged in.

Coverage of the British TUC congress: Thanks to Edd and others we have very impressive coverage of this and today will be doing a mailing to our UK list (over 10,000 addresses) to spread the word about this.

Our next book: We’re still writing the book and hope to have it ready in a few more days.  It’s hard to keep pace with the ever-changing world of mobile phones, but I think it will be a very interesting book.

Daily tech tips for trade unionists: A series I started on my blog which may be of interest to LabourStart correspondents.  Click here to see the first few.  Please feel free to add comments and make suggestions.

The Global Labour Movement – An Introduction: We’ve now completed the work on this, awaiting delivery of 100 copies to sell at our book launch on 4th May in London. Andy has been sent the text for possible translation into French.  You can order copies already – here.

Campaigning Online and Winning: We distributed 769 copies so far, of which 44 were free copies and 725 were sales. (77 were in French and 692 in English).

Campaigns – new: On Friday, 26 April, we launched an urgent action campaign at the request of IndustriALL in response to the disastrous building collapse in Bangladesh. I’ve added some text about the campaign to the Wikipedia entry and hope to continue to use Wikipedia in future to publicize our campaigns.

Campaigns – closed: We closed the Korea campaign. Still waiting to hear from the KGEU about what effect, if any, it had.

Campaigns – overhaul: I’ve successfully migrated our campaigns from the old, flat ASCII (text) database to a relational database using MySQL. Now I’m working on correcting the script that shows campaigns to show this one instead.

News – by country: I’ve changed the sort order so the most recent stories now appear first.

News – posting: Now when you modify a news story posted by someone else (senior correspondents only) it will not change the name of the correspondent who originally posted the story.

2014 LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference in Berlin: Edd has begun work on this.

May Day party in London (Saturday, 4th May): We’re up to 227 yes/maybe. Edd and I visited the venue last week.

I’ve begun a comprehensive review of the use of languages on LabourStart and have begun tightening things up, trying to make sure that a language that appears in one part of our system appears in the others. Over the years, it’s all become a bit of a mess, but here are some preliminary observations:

• In our news database, we allow input of news in 50 languages.
• Until recently, only 28 of those languages – the active ones – were properly tagged. From now on, all 50 languages are properly encoded.
• Only 28 languages have translated frameworks and are therefore listed on the front page.
• The five most heavily-used languages – the ones that have had 10,000 news stories or more in our database – are English, Finnish, French, Polish, and Norwegian.
• There are 25 languages that can be used for campaigns, though any code can be entered — even inaccurate ones (e.g., xx).
• As of this morning, we have mailing lists for all 50 languages. The 8 biggest, with more than 1,000 addresses each, are English, French, Italian, German, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

Some quick highlights …

1. We’ll be launching a new campaign sometime today or tomorrow in support of the Turkish trade unionists who were arrested this week.  We’re waiting on PSI and EI to agree a text.
2. Our book on online campaigning has been translated into French. Thank you Andy!  We’ll try to make it available as soon as possible.
3. We’ve done a mailing to our Canadian list to promote a Canada-specific campaign, and earlier this week mailed to our UK list to promote a UK-only campaign.  A third of our current campaigns are now country-specific.
4. We closed down the Cameroon musicians campaign today after three months.  Still waiting to hear from FIM about the results.
5. We launched our first campaign ever in Esperanto this afternoon.  We have a small Google Group for volunteer translators who did the work on this – much appreciated.
6. We had comprehensive coverage of the massive strike in India thanks to several correspondents – including Mahesh and Edd.
7. We wrote this week to hundreds of state labour federations and city central labour councils across the USA to promote our new newswires for each of the 50 states.
8. We’re up to 452 responses to our annual survey — nearly half of them this time in French.

Annual survey of trade union use of the net: This went live in English and French editions about 24 hours ago.  So far, there have been 271 responses.  Last year we got 2,954 over the course of a month, and the year before that, 1,336.

Site re-design: Work has resumed on this and significant progress made.  We’ll have a more attractive site to show in a few days.  For those of you desperate to see the work-in-progress, email me and I’ll tell you where to look.

Campaigns:

• New campaigns: We’re launching two new campaigns this week specifically for Canada (on behalf of COPE) and the UK (on behalf of RMT).
• Viewing campaign supporters: Some time ago we made it so that you needed a password to view the list of campaign supporters.  The problem was, you needed to embed that password in the URL.  This is now user-friendly; you can key in the password directly onto the page, in a form.
• Campaigns landing page: This now works in French – modeled on the English version.  We’ll eventually have this working for all languages.
• New languages for campaigns and mailing lists: We now have a significant mailing list for Tagalog (191 addresses).  Our Czech friends have completed translations so we now have a couple of campaigns and have done a mailing in Czech (95 subscribers).  We  have three volunteers signed up to help coordinate translations of our campaigns into Esperanto; they’ve formed a Google Group to share the effort.

Books:

• Book 1: The Kindle edition of our book (Campaigning Online and Winning)  is now live and has been promoted.  Sales of the paperback edition are now well above 500.  We’re waiting for the French and German translations.  We’ve essentially run out of the 100 copies we bought for the office, and have ordered – and received – 100 more. A review is appearing in the next edition of Labor Notes, in the USA.
• Book 2: Edd and I are in the advanced stages of planning for this one — more details very soon.
• Book 3: I completed and submitted my manuscript to UCS 12 days ago — waiting to hear from them what else they need, and a schedule.  The working title is Making Unions Stronger – Using the Internet Better, but this will change.

News database:

• Countries list for news database: There were several versions of this — you could, for example, add a story for a new country such as “South Sudan”, and that country was one of the options, but that name didn’t appear in the list of countries on the front page of LabourStart.  This has now been fixed — both scripts are now reading from the same file.
• Languages for posting news: While it was possible to post to LabourStart in some 50 languages, we have only about 30 translated front pages — so if you posted a news story in, say, Urdu, it entered the database and would have appeared if you searched for news in all languages — but was not tagged in our database with any specific language.  This has now been fixed, and every story in the database from now on is tagged with a language code.
• Newswires for all 50 US states: We now have this — previously we had for fewer than a dozen.  Now we have to think about how to publicize this – it could be useful for local unions, state federations, and so on.

Fundraising:

• Fundraising: I wrote to every global union federation last week; only two have responded, one with a promise to donate more than last year.
• Fundraising evening in London: We’re making plans to hold this on 27 April – details coming soon.

Campaigns:

• I contacted Hava Is about their campaign (aviation workers in Turkey); they want to continue it for another month in part because of the ITF’s renewed commitment to this cause.
• There was a fairly large backlog of campaigns that had been translated, or mailings, that required additional work by me.  About two thirds of these have now been done, and I’ve asked translators to help out by posting the content directly themselves – this is now happening in German, for example.
• The page showing how campaigns are doing in all languages now continues a clear link to see the breakdown for each campaign, including showing countries.
• The Algeria campaign has been closed.
• We suffered a brief (hour long) distributed denial of service attack to our connection the new server in Iceland; following this, I discovered a fairly large number of spammers trying to sign up to our campaigns.  I removed all the ones I could identify from our mailing lists and then added a simple spam-prevention bit of code to the campaigns software (which had a bug in it that caused problems for about a day).
• I wrote to all translators showing them what was missing and encouraging them to translate all active campaigns and mass mailings.
• We’ve had campaigns translated into Indonesian and Portuguese for the first time in years – thanks to new volunteer translators.
• We’re about to launch a new campaign in support of public sector workers in Swaziland.

Conference: We had a Skype videoconference with Andrew and Alison in Sydney and Eric in London to clarify what’s being done, and what needs to be done, over the next three months.

Correspondents: I appealed to our 73,000+ subscribers in English for new correspondents; only 3 have volunteered so far (2 from the UK, one from Ireland).

Fundraising: I continue to mail out brochures to local labour councils throughout Ireland (including Northern Ireland) and to the 26 local labour councils in London.

Office: I continued the search for a new London office for LabourStart.

And all the usual stuff: The monthly “LabourStart in Numbers” report (see below).  Backups – every week – of the entire site, the mailing lists, and the databases.  New users added every day to UnionBook.  Regular postings to social media – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, UnionBook.  Answering dozens of LabourStart emails every day.

Behind the propaganda, the reality is bleak for North Korean workers.

It’s “North Korea Freedom Week” – I’ll be you didn’t know that – and I was able to hear first hand from three North Korean refugees at a meeting at the House of Commons in London on Wednesday just what life is like in that country.   (There were also speakers from other groups, including Amnesty International.)  One of the points made at the meeting was that considering that the human rights situation in North Korea is so poor, perhaps the worst in the world, it is extraordinary how few people raise this issue.  The North Korean regime clearly benefits from the fact that so little attention is paid to violations of human rights there.

LabourStart is not alone in the international trade union movement in having very little information about what goes on in North Korea.  If you read the annual report on violations of trade union rights published by the ITUC, the section on ‘violations’ in North Korea is empty.  (It’s about 500 words long when it comes to, for example, Israel.)  The ILO’s committee on free association mentions Korea 38 times in its March 2012 report – but all 38 are references to South Korea, where unions enjoy a degree of independence some of us have witnessed first-hand.

Trade unionists around the world need to be made aware of the actual situation of workers in North Korea. Which is where we come in — we have look for information and get the information out there.  For that reason, as of this afternoon we have three countries called Korea in our list of countries where previously there was only one.  Stories specifically focussed on South or North Korea can now be separated out.  The first story about North Korea appears today on our front page — and I hope there will be many more.

As our campaigns have grown, increasingly people are finding that they get error messages after clicking on a ‘submit’ button.  I don’t mean error messages from the target — I mean our own scripts fail to execute.  Clearly our server is under strain when several hundred people try to simultaneously send off messages.  This will require a long term fix, both in terms of tweaking our software to speed things up, and possibly even moving the campaigns onto a different, faster server.

As a first step towards making things more efficient, I’ve finally removed the unnecessary second stage – the one where you confirm you want to send off your message.  It’s now a one-click process.  You fill in the form, and you get the screen telling you it’s been done.

On another matter, some idiot has decided to try to spam all our correspondents using our internal messaging system.  This will take a while to secure and to remove the spam content already sent (not all of you will have seen this).  Meanwhile, I’ve shut down the display of such messages until I can fix this.