Mar
11
2022
0

300 participants in our International Women’s Day webinar

Elizabeth Tang from the IDWF.

International Women’s Day: Our webinar run jointly with the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) was a success. About 300 people participated in the event on Zoom and Facebook. The event was recorded and we shared the link today (https://vimeo.com/686778630).

Jordan: Working together with the Education International, we will be hosting a webinar next Friday, 18.3 in English and Arabic. We will be reopening our campaign in support of the Jordanian Teachers’ Association which was suspended a while back.

UK: We were invited to speak to the London/South East TUC about LabourStart this week — and also got the chance to speak with a group of fisherman from Namibia who were on the call.

Donations: IndustriALL has made a very generous donation.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Events,Fund-raising |
Mar
04
2022
0

Our first-ever global webinar on International Women’s Day

International Women’s Day: We agreed a day, time and topic for a global webinar organised with the International Domestic Workers Federation. We’ve done a lot of publicity on social media and mass mailings. IDWF is pulling together a fantastic panel. The event takes place on Tuesday, 8 March at 13:00. This is the URL to register to attend the event: http://www.labourstart.org/go/iwd2022

Lithuania: Our campaign continues to grow. We’re now at 5,563 supporters. The strike has been suspended due to the state of emergency in the country, but they have asked to continue promoting the campaign.   This week we did another mass mailing to our English list.

Ukraine: We continue posting lots of news from unions around the world about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Using our website and social media accounts we have promoted the ITUC appeal for donations too.

UK: Next week I’ve been invited to speak at an online event organised by trade unions in London and the South East of England on the subject of global solidarity and LabourStart.

USA: We’re helping the Progressive Caucus of Democrats Abroad, at their request, with weekly labour news bulletins, focussing mainly on US labour news.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Events |
Feb
25
2022
0

Ukraine: LabourStart reacts to Putin’s war

Ukraine: Following the Russian invasion on Thursday morning, we have made certain to offer comprehensive coverage of the trade union reaction in Ukraine, Russia and around the world on our news page and across social media.

We have also been in touch with all 18 of our correspondents in Ukraine.  One of them wrote back, saying:

Thank you very much for your genuine support. At the moment we need as strong an international reaction as possible,  more demonstrations and political pressure on the EU and the governments to react with economic and political sanctions against Putin, his family members and Russian corporations. And Ukraine needs financial and military support as well.  It is also obvious that we will need help in providing humanitarian aid to the union members, refugees and war victims. We appreciate your support and will let you know what that may mean in practical terms.”

Cambodia: Thanks to a mass mailing to members of the UNITE HERE union in the USA promoting the campaign, it jumped to nearly 15,000 supporters — a gain of nearly 2,000 in just one day.

Colombia: Our campaign continues to grow following our follow-up mailing. The number of supporters has grown from 4,809 to 6,092 as a result.

Lithuania: Our campaign went live this last week. Today it appears in 11 languages with more on the way, and has 4,272 supporters.  It will be our first campaign ever in all three Baltic languages — including Estonian and Latvian.

Instagram: Our presence there has been vastly improved and the number of followers is starting to grow.

International Women’s Day: We are now expecting to organise a major online event featuring domestic workers and in partnership with their global union.

Mailing list: Our list continues to grow as we add new campaigns. This week we picked up 399 new subscribers – and launched our mailing list in Lithuanian.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Events,Mailing list,Social networks |
Sep
09
2021
0

Weekly update: Afghanistan, Iran, Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Sweden and Thailand

Afghanistan: We continue to look for, and promote, news about the fate of the trade unions and workers, with several top stories — many coming from the International Federation of Journalists.

Iran: We’ll be participating in an online event on Sunday in support of striking oil workers.

Korea: We had a lot of information about the arrest of the leader of the KCTU, and publicised this across social media.

Kyrgyzstan: We shared widely the good news that following a campaign on LabourStart, the anti-worker bill was finally vetoed by the President.

Sweden: Our comrades have asked us to wait until 15 September before launching the campaign.

Thailand: We’re asked for permission to close down the campaign which has now been running for three months.

Correspondents: We signed up new correspondents in Brussels and Geneva. Our new Moroccan correspondent has been active, posting in Arabic, French and English.

Donations: We received a generous donation from UNI Global Union.

Essential for Recovery event: We did extensive publicity to support this event, which is being backed by ITUC, UNI, Solidarity Center, WIEGO and others.

Global Labour Calendar 2022: We’re continuing to collect photos and suggestions for dates to highlight. If there are dates in this list that you think should appear in the calendar, please let us know.

Jobs: We were approached by two unions who asked about how jobs are added to LabourStart and one has already signed up as a correspondent to post these. Unions are beginning to see the value in LabourStartJobs.org. Correspondents are encouraged to post jobs using the same link as we use to post news.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Correspondents,Events,Fund-raising |
Jul
21
2021
0

After more than 10 weeks, we owe you an apology …

This long-delayed report covers quite a bit of time — more than ten weeks. And it’s been a very busy ten weeks at that. This will be concise, but from next week I hope to resume regular weekly updates which can feature some more details. So here, basically, are the headlines since 10 May …

Campaigns: We launched quite a few, and even won some. These included campaigns in support of tobacco workers in the USA (in partnership with FLOC and the IUF), Thailand (with IndustriALL), Metro workers in Bucharest, Romania (with ETF and EPSU), Brazil, Colombia, and more. We also closed campaigns in Albania, India, Israel, Algeria and Ukraine. The last two were victories — our brother Mourad in Algeria was released from jail, and Profbud reached agreement with the employer in Ukraine. We’ve also had a partial win in Turkey, as Cihan has been released from jail but ordered to remain in the country to stand trial (that campaign continues).

Webinars: We held two excellent webinars in June, with several hundred participants. These focussed on Colombia and Brazil, and were closely tied to campaigns we launched in support of workers in both countries. Both the webinars and the campaigns have helped to raise the profile of our work in Latin America. We also reached out to the RWDSU in the USA to get a webinar going around the Amazon organising effort, but that seems to have stalled.

Publications: Dan Gallin’s new book Resistance was published and we’ve promoted it widely, including a limited time offer of free versions on Kindle. We have begun work on a 2022 Global Labour Calendar, our first in many years. We have also been working on a long-overdue edition of our Campaigning Online and Winning book.

Interns: The intern we were expecting to begin employing in mid-June was not available to us. Meanwhile, we are working on getting one or more interns from Canadian universities.

Fundraising: We did our annual appeal in mid-June, followed up by mailings about the release of Mourad and Cihan. We also did our first Facebook fundraiser, meeting our target this week. We’ve received generous donations in the last couple of months from IndustriALL, EPSU and ETF, and have reached out to other global unions and European federations. In addition, we have had tremendous support from a number of Canadian unions.

Outreach: We were approached by a team of academics in Canada who are doing “a research project which focuses on technology-driven innovation for the labour movement”. Eric had a two-hour interview with them, and Derek will soon be invited as well.

Fixes and changes to LabourStart: We are always making small changes, but in recent days have begun to attack a very long to-do list of suggested changes. We have now sorted out the country news pages for countries which have changed their names so that you will automatically see a link to the alternate name (e.g., Burma / Myanmar) — for the moment, this works only in English. We also fixed a problem with tweeting campaigns not in English and this seems to be working.

Blue skies: One project just beginning will be the tagging of news stories if these concern jobs in the labour movement. We often have such stories and we will find a way to show them in one place for people looking for such jobs — at no cost to the unions.

Dec
28
2020
0

A busy end to 2020 at LabourStart

At the end of each year, we write to all our volunteer translators. Our message this year included this:

We’ve run 24 campaigns this year.

Some of these campaigns resulted in victories for the workers.

We’ve helped get trade unionists released from jail, companies to sit down and negotiate with workers’ representatives, and workers reinstated after being wrongfully sacked.

Thanks to your efforts, these campaigns often appear in many languages — and as a result are much larger and more effective than campaigns that appear only in English or a handful of major languages.

We are strong believers in linguistic diversity and equality, and we believe that workers everywhere should be encouraged to participate in global solidarity campaigns, regardless of what language they speak.

Your work is turning that commitment of ours into a reality.

We also write to all our volunteer correspondents. In this year’s message, we wrote:

According to our statistics, 111 of you posted 55,618 news stories to our site this year. That’s average of 155 news stories every day of the year.

A new labour news story every 9 minutes.

When I look at the mainstream media news sites, I barely see a hint of all this news. Working people and our unions rarely make headlines.

Even some union websites feature hardly any updated news. Some major union websites go weeks without a single update.

But not LabourStart.

If you don’t glance at our site for a week, you’ve missed 1,000 news stories.

This is entirely due to your efforts — and to your understanding of our movement and the challenges we face, in your country and all over the world.

In the last two weeks, despite the holiday season, we’ve been busy as usual.

New campaign: We launched a new campaign in support of Ukrainian workers who have gone without pay for the last three years. The campaign is backed by the Ukrainian union PROFBUD and BWI. Today it already has nearly 4,000 supporters, and appears in 9 languages with more coming.

Our home page: This is now working in Russian and Ukrainian, showing our current campaigns. The ‘more campaigns’ link now works for all languages, which are showing only the most recent active campaigns. All links on the home page that pointed to insecure (http) links now point to secure (https) versions of the same page. We’ve been going through our home pages in all languages trying to make certain that all signup links to our mailing list now point to Mailchimp and not Sendy.

Reviving dormant languages: We wrote to volunteer translators for Finnish and Polish, and are following up also with Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese as well. All of these languages have had volunteer translators in the past, and if we can revive them all, our campaigns will reach much larger audiences.

Outreach: We wrote to a large number if Indian and Pakistani mine workers’ unions, and also reached out to the person who controls the ‘India labour news’ page on Facebook, in the hope of growing LabourStart’s presence in the region.

Bookshop: We’ve added many more titles to our US and UK bookshops on bookshop.org, and are planning to hold live author events on Zoom next month. In December, the US bookshop had 241 views and the UK one had 384 views and two sales.

Correspondents’ webinar: Our first-ever online meeting with correspondents was a success, with 35 participants.

LinkedIn: We now have a page in addition to our long-standing group. It has 33 followers. The group has grown to 2,250.

Resistance: This is the working title of the next collection of essays by Dan Gallin which we will be publishing in the next few weeks. Work on this has now resumed.

Oct
29
2020
0

New campaign in Belarus; our first album; “Alexa, play LabourStart” and more …

We last updated this blog two weeks ago — and what a fortnight it has been!

CAMPAIGNS:

We launched a new campaign demanding the release of jailed trade unionists in Belarus; after just six days online it is already our 5th largest active campaign (out of 9) and could easily grow into our largest. In addition to all the usual publicity, I wrote about it in my weekly column for Solidarity, which was shared widely.

Jailed trade unionists in Belarus.

Jailed trade unionists in Belarus.

Soon we’ll do followups after a week online and this should give it a big boost; our recent Myanmar campaign grew by about 25% thanks to that second wave of publicity, so this will almost certainly result in the campaign reaching 7,000 supporters, if not many more.

We now have 9 live campaigns, and here they are listed in order of the number of supporters and including the date they were launched:

1 Belarus: Stop the violence – defend democracy and human rights – 21-Aug-2020 – 7412
2 Myanmar: Stop union-busting at sporting goods company – 14-Oct-2020 – 7033
3 Colombia: Support miners striking against the ‘death shift’ at Cerrejón – 01-Oct-2020 – 6733
4 Albania: Solidarity with the miners – end repression now – 12-Dec-2019 – 6544
5 Belarus: Free union leaders and activists – 23-Oct-2020 – 5862
6 Jordan: Release leaders of the Jordanian Teacher Association – 10-Aug-2020 – 5838
7 Cambodia: Free jailed union leaders now – 24-Aug-2020 – 5729
8 India: Workers’ rights under attack – 13-Jun-2020 – 5678
9 Ukraine: Support miners in their fight for decent conditions – 18-Sep-2020 – 5346

We have another campaign in the pipeline from Israel, involving young workers and a major transnational company.

To help raise awareness of how successful we are with these campaigns, we’ve been sharing the translated PDFs of our campaign victories across social media, showing a new language every other day.

MAILING LISTS:

Our lists grew significantly in the last two weeks, as we added 822 new subscribers, mostly to the English list. (If we continue at this pace, we’ll pick up 21,000 new subscribers in the next year.) We also added 239 new subscribers to our Belarusian list yesterday, which previously had just 18 subscribers.

In an effort to raise awareness of our new campaigns in Punjabi (every campaign is now translated into that language, which is spoken by 125 million people), we did a mailing to 1,400 people from India and Pakistan on our English mailing list — and invited their help to translate our campaigns into other languages in that region.

FUNDRAISING:

We completed a 4-week campaign to sell our “Workers’ Rights are Human Rights” union-made t-shirts and increased sales from 130 to 230 by the time the campaign ended. The company which is producing the t-shirts (CustomInk) has already paid us our share, including many individual donations over and above the cost of the shirts.

People should begin receiving their shirts in the next 10 days and we wrote to everyone who ordered, suggesting that people post photos of themselves in the shirts on social media, which we can then share.

Our best-selling LabourStart t-shirt.

Because of problems some people were having with PayPal — and a reluctance by some to use PayPal on principle — we’ve added an alternative way to donate to LabourStart (Transferwise) to our donations page, and have suggested it to some individuals. We’ll mention this the next time we try to raise money. Transferwise allows easy international bank transfers as well as credit and debit card payments, with no need to sign up for an account.

We received generous donations from CUPE in Canada and the Education International, as well as pledges from both the ITUC and ETUC.

David Thorpe, a British entertainer and long-time supporter of LabourStart, has released an album with his band and is generously donating 30% of the proceeds to LabourStart. We’ll shortly be publicising this.

David Thorpe.

David Thorpe.

TELEGRAM:

Some time ago we set up a public channel on this network, which is widely used by pro-democracy protestors in Belarus, Hong Kong and Thailand. Two weeks ago, it had just 26 subscribers and we had not been posting to it. We’ve now revived it, and there are 137 subscribers now. We’ve begun posting regularly to this group — mostly events, new campaigns, and our photo of the week. We hope we can grow this by several hundred in the next few weeks.

INSTAGRAM:

This is another social network that we had not been using — but we now have an account and a page there, and already have 100 followers. Anyone who wants to help post images and texts there is invited to volunteer.

SMART SPEAKERS:

Tens of millions of people now use smart speakers (most notably Amazon echo, but there are others including Google Home and Apple’s Siri) to play music, listen to the news, etc. We now have a rudimentary LabourStart ‘skill’ which reads out (and shows on-screen) the latest top global labour news stories, updated every day. We should have a public version of this ready in the next few days.

LabourStart news - on an Amazon Echo device.

LabourStart news – on an Amazon Echo device.

AND FROM AROUND THE WORLD …

Armenia and Azerbaijan: We’ve given extensive coverage to the international and local trade union responses to the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, and now regularly report on the region. I wrote about this in a recent column for Solidarity.

Canada: LabourStart will be sponsoring a prize in CLIFF – the labour film festival.

Georgia: We’re reached out and gotten agreement from the Georgian Trade Union Confederation to resume translating all our campaigns and mailings into Georgian. We’ve also reached out (twice) to our five inactive correspondents in Georgia, and will soon try to recruit more. We’ve also shared a document on how to do global labour solidarity conferences with the GTUC, as we consider Tbilisi as a possible venue for such a conference in late 2021.

Singapore: A local union activist reached out to us and we had a very long discussion, including ways in which LabourStart can be helpful, particularly in supporting exploited migrant workers there.

USA: We continue to reach out to unions, including the mineworkers and farmworkers, and expect to shortly hold a live event online with the latter.

May
19
2020
0

First new campaign in months – and LabourStart.tv is revived

Belarus: We will be launching a campaign shortly together with IndustriALL.

Soy Sros.

Mrs. Soy Sros, president of the CUMW local union at Superl Cambodia.

Cambodia: We launched our first new campaign in months in support of a sacked woman trade union leader. This is likely to be our first campaign to appear in the Khmer language.

Canada: We did a mailing to our list in support of a UFCW campaign.

Iran: LabourStart has been invited to play a part in the upcoming international day of solidarity with Iranian political prisoners; we will submit a video.

Myanmar: A campaign has been proposed; we are currently in discussions about how to move forward on this.

About LabourStart: This page — which we now link to prominently on campaigns — has now been updated and improved.

Events: We have stopped using this feature on LabourStart as no one was adding new events.

LabourStart.tv: We’ve revived this, and now have the labourstart.tv domain name again. For many of the videos, we now have embedded them onto the page, so you don’t have to leave LabourStart to view them. (As a result, the page looks much more interesting.) Correspondents have been encouraged to tag videos to appear here, and that part of the link submission page has been highlighted to make this easier. There’s also now a prominent graphic link to labourstart.tv on our home page.

Website design: We have migrated several more of our languages to the new home page; right now 26 languages use the new page and we have only 9 left to convert, which will take place in the next few days.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Events,LabourStart.tv |
Jun
07
2019
0

Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines – we focus on Asia this month

Pictured: LabourStart editor Eric Lee with leaders of the Malaysian Trades Union Congress last week in Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysia: LabourStart editor Eric Lee spent several days in Malaysia, working together with the Ethical Trading Initiative on a new project they have started on migrant labour. We met with leaders of Malaysian unions, including the Malaysian Trades Union Congress, a number of pro-labour NGOs, a social democratic MP, activists from the Malaysian Socialist Party, and representatives of the global union federations BWI and IndustriALL in the country.

Pakistan campaign: At the request of the ITF, we launched a campaign in supported of 8 sacked dock workers in Karachi. After about a week online, it had just over 5,200 supporters and appeared in 13 languages.

Philippines campaign: At the request of BWI, we launched a campaign against the giant transnational company Holcim. After less than a week online, it had over 4,700 supporters and appeared in 14 languages.

Email service provider: Our current provider is MailChimp and it’s quite expensive. We are currently exploring alternatives, and have migrated some of our lists over to Sendy, a much less costly solution, using a hosting service in Belgium that specialises in this.

Telegram: Following the revelations about hacking that targetted WhatsApp — and specifically targetted activists — we set up a public LabourStart channel on the more secure Telegram platform, a closed private group for members of our Executive, and will soon announce a public discussion group using Telegram as well.

Arthur Svensson prize: LabourStart, which won this prestigious Norwegian trade union award in 2016, has been invited back to Oslo for a ceremony in June to honour the current recipient.

Written by ericlee in: Campaigns,Events,Mailing list,Publicity |
Jul
20
2018
1

Russia campaign takes off

Our campaign in support of Professor Maxim Balashov and the trade union at MIPT in Moscow is growing very rapidly, thanks to a surge of support from teachers’ unions in many countries. It is our first campaign in some time to exceed 8,000 supporters, having picked up more than 2,000 new supporters in the last week.

We’ve also seen significant growth for our Norway, Korea, and XPO campaigns. (Growth for the last two is due to followup mailings sent out this week to our English list.) We’ve scheduled a similar mailing in support of the Australia campaign which will go out this evening and should jump-start that effort too, and probably bring it up to over 6,000 supporters.

Here’s a snapshot of how our campaigns are doing – the number in brackets is where stood a week ago:

Russia: Union-busting at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology – 8,006 [5,996]
Norway: Sekkingstad and Sund, stop union busting! – 7,276 [6,869]
France: Rail unions fight against privatisation – 7,150 [7,141]
Turkey: After nearly a year on the picket lines, it’s time for DPDHL to negotiate with the union – 6,733 [6,714]
USA: Time for Wendt to negotiate with the union – 6,727 [6,717]
Korea: Oracle workers on strike – 6,548 [5,878]
XPO: Time to talk about your behaviour – 6,488 [5,503]
Australia: Exxon Mobil – time for a fair deal for your workers – 5,174 [5,155]
Shell – Stop cheating contract workers! – 3,562 [3,515]
Canada: Solidarity With Women Striking for a Living Wage! – 2,014 [1,884]

In other news this week …

Europe: We had extensive coverage of the Amazon strike in Spain, Germany and Portugal, both on our news pages and in social media. The strikes were timed to coincide with Amazon’s Prime Day.

Georgia: We publicised the terrible mine disaster widely on social networks.

Germany: A belated fundraising mailing produced good results, with some 26 donors giving an average of €27 each.

India: We promoted both with a mailing and on social media Traidcraft’s campaign in support of tea workers — after getting the green light from the IUF, who have also promoted this campaign.

Turkey: We promoted the IUF’s new Cargill campaign on social media.

Campaigns: We had a problem that some of our campaigns included graphics (union logos) on insecure web pages; this broke our page and some people were seeing warnings in their browsers. There were 21 campaign pages in various languages that had this problem; all of them are now fixed.

Correspondents: We signed up four new correspondents from Australia, Ireland, Liberia and Ukraine. We wrote to 28 of our correspondents in Australia appealing to them to become more active.

Events calendar: The script to delete events had been broken; we have now fixed this.

Mailing lists: We asked our translators to translate 18 words of text to encourage people to join our mailing lists – in the next few days this will be added to our campaign software, and should boost the numbers joining our lists (we already do this in English). This is a followup to changes we had to make in accordance with GDPR which bans us from automatically adding people to our lists. This week we were able to add 55 people to our lists, 42 of them to the English list.

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