Inside LabourStart

Next generation LabourStart

The number of users of our Android app in English, launched on 11 November, has grown to 587 (gained only 25 new users in December); the average reviewer gave it 4.88 stars. Our Android app in Esperanto, launched on 26 November, has been installed 17 times.

Our iOS app (for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) has just been approved by the Apple App store (we submitted it on 3 December at first) and will be launched in the next two days. This app was designed in Como, which we can use to create apps for both Android and iOS, and will do so.

We have received the translation for the Norwegian version of our apps and expect this go live shortly.

Tunis Retreat

We’ll have more to report on this throughout January.

A reminder was sent to all correspondents to respond to the pre-retreat survey; so far we’ve had 58 responses and will provide a full report soon.

Campaigns

We launched only two campaigns in December and closed one of them fairly quickly at the request of the union – these were the ones surrounding the jailing of Colombian union leader Huber Ballesteros, and the other concerned Luis Isarra in Peru. The Peru campaign has generated only 5,634 messages of protest so far, while the Colombia campaign generated 7,450.

We closed three campaigns in December — Deva in Turkey, USA IKEA and the Colombia industrial accident campaign, which resulted in a big win.

At the moment, we are running only four active campaigns — and three of those will close within the next four weeks.

A trade union leader in Bangladesh has offered to translate our campaigns into Bengali; I have sent him the framework file to translate.

We launched our first Romanian language campaign, and mailing list.

Online campaigning course

The European Trade Union Institute has approved our proposal for a 3-day course on the subject of online campaigning, to be held in Germany in June. More details soon.

Books

Our latest book, Dan Gallin’s Solidarity, is being translated into Russian by Masha.

I’ve signed a contract with Professor Joe Atkins for a LabourStart book due to appear at the end of 2015 about migrant workers. More details coming soon.

Finances

We received a generous donation from the Education International.

I wrote to all correspondents about the annual Svennsson prize which could be major boost to LabourStart if we ever win it.

Fairphone

We ran a mini-campaign to raise the issue of workers’ rights at Fairphone, which briefly got a lot of attention and a phone call from the company.

Tweaks

We learned (from Mahesh) that there was a problem with our code that allowed people to tweet any news story that appeared on LabourStart — if there was an apostrophe in the story title, it didn’t work. This has now been fixed.

I also fixed the drop down menu showing country names on the French language home page, and a couple of other small fixes to the page.

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 …

Campaigns: Three new campaigns were launched in the last week, plus we did publicity for the IUF campaign on Colombia and IndustriALL’s campaign on Iraq.  I really appreciate the incredible work done by our volunteer translators in getting these translations done.

Berlin 2014: Our conference blog is being updated, some 40 people have already registered, and we’re doing loads of publicity. On Friday, I was invited to address a meeting of global union communicators at the ITF headquarters in London about the conference.  There were participants from the ITUC, ITF, IndustriALL, PSI, etc.  I migrated the entire database of conference participants to a relational database using MySQL, which has made it much easier to display (and sort) the list of people who’ve registered.  I wrote to 10 comrades in Turkey specifically appealing for help building a Turkish contingent; no one has replied yet.  If you’ve not yet registered, please do so today – click here.

Mailings to national lists: We just did a mailing to our UK list advertising a half dozen events taking place in the next month and plan to do this regularly; we encouraged people to submit their events to our online events list — and we’ll take future ones from there.  We also did a Canada-only mailing today promoting a Bangladesh garment workers’ meeting in Toronto.

Writings: I had an article in Solidarity about the successful railway workers’ strike in Georgia and have been commissioned to write something on the same subject for Equal Times.  I have also been commissioned to write about the Histadrut’s recent organizing successes for Jungle World, in Germany.

Book & calendar sales: Still sluggish.  We’ve now sold 190 calendars; our third book (Firefox OS) is up to over 160.  An attempt to promote sales of the book on the Iraqi labour movement, “Hadi Never Died”, disappointed with only two sales. Tom is preparing a calendar of trade union events in the UK at which we can sell our publications in 2014, following on the success Derek had at the CUPE convention in Canada.  Comrades — you can help by posting reviews of our books on Amazon and spreading the word about all LabourStart publications.

Social networks: Our group on Facebook is growing quite quickly, though we’re doing nothing to promote it.  66 people joined in the last week alone.  On Twitter, we’ve launched a low-key, low-cost ad campaign which has brought us 12 new followers in the last 2 days (at a cost of £2.00).

1. I’ve tweaked our front page in English yet again, getting rid of the Firefox ad, creating a new and more prominent ad for all our books (not just the most recent) and with a link to our new publications page.  This has resulted in today’s labour news being much closer to the top of the page (less scrolling).
2. I completed work publicizing our Peru campaign, which is lagging somewhat as it’s August.  Please do what you can to help build this.
3. Our popular Canadian edition has gotten a makeover in its French version, which now features French language Canada-only campaigns, French language events and some small corrections to province names.
4. We’ve made some good progress on our LabourStart calendar — lots of great events added, and Edd working hard to find 13 great photos.
5. Found a solution to a small problem we were having with the caption to our photo of the day feature.
6. On our campaign pages, we’re now showing news in the local language first, so if you’re looking at our Peru campaign in French, in the latest news box, you’ll see the French news before the English news.
7. We also had a problem with the campaign counter in the unusual situation where we may continue running a campaign in one language having shut it down in English.  Now fixed, sort of.
8. Edd has given me a lesson in how to prepare a book for publication in CreateSpace — we hope to have our third book ready in early September.
9. Our conference organizing committee met in Berlin yesterday — we’re told it was a productive meeting and they have another one scheduled in two weeks.
10. The UE has given us permission to close down its campaign on August 20th – so this is your last chance to build support …
11. I’ve reviewed our “dormant languages” – the ones we set up, but which haven’t been showing any news recently.  After a major push by us, we managed to revive the Italian and Portuguese editions, and there are even some signs of life in our Serbian edition.  But disappointment in the Nordic countries — only the Norwegian edition is alive, and despite our best efforts, we’ve not been able to revive our once-lively Finnish edition or the Danish and Swedish editions.  Will continue trying.
12. Our campaigns employ a version of “responsive design” now and render better than ever on mobile phones (test this and compare what you see to what’s on the desktop). This is hugely important as a growing number of people get email messages from us on their phones and they need to see the campaigns correctly without needing to scroll horizontally.  Many campaigning organizations still get this wrong, unfortunately.
13. Oh, and Twitter cards is now working for us.  Have a look at some of my recent tweets.  You may need to click on View Summary under the tweet to see what I’ve done.

Edd attended the Global Labour Institute’s (GLI) International Summer School at Northern College, UK, last week. Here’s a short report back and some thoughts from a LabourStart point of view.

The theme of the school was ‘the political agenda of the international trade union movement’, and most sessions were bound together by the idea that we need to put socialism back at the heart of the labour movement. Among the 100+ participants, 21 countries were represented and there was a good mix of ages and experience – most, but not all, of the younger trade unionists came from here in the UK. In this country, the sort of labour-internationalism pushed by the GLI is a very necessary counterweight to the prevailing internationalism in the unions, which too often goes no further than whether or not your branch is affiliated to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign…

One of the recurrent themes of the school was the increasing prevalence of ‘precarious’ work across all sectors of the global economy, which is making the establishment (or re-establishment) of collective bargaining more difficult. Some unions are beginning to rethink and reshape their structures to deal with this, aiming to bring these workers into the movement. Comrades from the global south made the point that what we call precarious and informal work has been the norm in their countries for decades or longer. It struck me throughout the week that unions in the ‘West’ probably now have more to learn from these comrades than to teach them.

The school was marked by a genuine atmosphere of open debate – on issues like the re-emergence (or not) of the WFTU, for example. A South African comrade whose union is not affiliated to the WFTU nevertheless said he could understand why other unions were attracted to it, given the lack of political lead from the ITUC. A live video Q&A session with Sharan Burrow from the ITUC on the Thursday showed a fair amount of dissatisfaction with the organisation, particularly from young people. There were also differences of opinion, for example, on how the All-China Federation of Trade Unions should be approached (if at all) – a comrade from Hong Kong was fairly optimistic about the chances of workers democratising it by mass pressure from below, even if this takes several years.

There was a really interesting session with a critical assessment of the ‘organizing model’ of trade unionism. This is being questioned in the US now, not long after it has started to really take root in other countries. The gist of the discussion was that the practice of setting up organiser training academies has its advantages, but is in danger of creating an insular group of professional organisers within the union, rather than equipping, for example, shop stewards, to take on organising work themselves (although this is made difficult by a lack of facility time, etc).

There was only one significant potential contradiction I saw in the politics of the event: everyone wants a strong independent union movement with explicitly socialist politics, but also a ‘broad alliance’ of unions and civil society groups against the effects of neo-liberal capitalism. My worry is that, at least in this country, the ‘broad alliance’ language is often cover for the further watering down of the unions’ politics. This is an issue which I don’t think is being adequately addressed yet in debates within the movement – can we place unions at the head of such an alliance and keep good politics? If so, how?

LabourStart

Obviously there’s a lot of crossover between LabourStart and the GLI in terms of the people involved. Quite a few LabourStart correspondents were there, particularly from the IUF millieu, and the British trade unionists present had generally heard of us and were in many cases on the mailing list. We made a new contact from IUF India who may be able to help us out finding volunteer translators for Indian languages, which would fill a huge gap in our global campaigns. Gisela, who has been helping out organising the Berlin 2014 conference, and I also had a discussion with Dan Gallin who gave us some ideas about what sort of sessions we could run in Berlin next year, particularly with regard to the Eurozone crisis and the union response to it. I also gave 15 copies of each of our books to people who had expressed an interest in us and the work we do.

I think we should make a big effort to involve some comrades from the global south in the Berlin conference, as well as trying for a balance of male/female speakers. There are a couple of speakers from the GLI event that Gisela has already talked to about Berlin 2014, or will shortly.

There’s a lot more I could mention – feel free to ask anything in the comments below or email me at <eddmustill@labourstart.org>

Campaigns
Turkey – This is the big one, likely to become the largest campaign we’ve ever done, and possibly even reach my personal goal of 20,000 messages sent, sometime this week.  Lots of updates below.
Small screen version goes live – Our campaigns now look MUCH better on smartphones and tablets, a first example of “responsive web design” on LabourStart, with more to come.

Berlin 2014
Edd and I drafted a very short document explaining what we’re hoping to achieve in Berlin at next year’s LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference.  We’ll be having a phone call with the ITUC today and a meeting with Gisela, who is based in Berlin, in two weeks, in London.

Publicity
We’ve been running a Facebook ad campaign for nearly 3 weeks now.  It’s cost us $288.00, the ads have been seen by 68,389 people in the UK and Germany, and we’ve picked up 677 new ‘likes’.  As a result of this, we now have 1,694 likes from the UK and 185 from Germany — making it our 6th strongest country.
As reported below, we got good publicity in the German/Austrian Esperanto magazine.

Books
Book sales continue to be slow.  In June, we sold only 19 copies of the Global Labour Movement book, and 4 of Campaigning and Winning (all in English).

Site traffic
As reported below, we’ve started using Clicky to provide real-time updates on traffic to our sites.  It was quite fun to watch a world map light up when we launched the Turkey campaign.

Internationalization
We’ve identified 11 “dormant languages” on our news pages where correspondents have ceased to be active.  We prioritized six of these (Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese, Farsi, Italian) and have posted a message on each one explaining that the page is not currently being updated, but asking for volunteers to help.  We’ve also begun writing to each mailing list in these languages and have already gotten some new correspondents.
We have been able to do those mailings and post messages in those languages because we have picked up a number of new volunteer translators.  We did this by writing to people from different countries who had signed up to the English language version of our Turkey campaign.  As a result, we have an unprecedented 24 languages for the Turkey campaign.
Finally, we continue to constantly update our news pages.  Most recently, our French-language Canada page is shaping up well, with top stories now for the first time.

Events
We now have a proper form to submit events and people have begun submitting them.  We’ll set this up so that events for specific countries are automatically sent by email to the appropriate editors who will decide what to post.  We’ll begin publicity to all our correspondents and subscribers once things quiet down a bit here …

Campaigns: We launched two new campaigns this week and closed down one.

Our campaign in support of General Electric’s Erie, Pennsyslvania workers (organized by the UE), has already gotten over 7,500 messages sent in 9 languages with more to come.

The UK-only campaign we launched in support of outsourced workers at the University of London has gotten just under 1,200 messages.

In addition, we closed down the Turkey campaign after 3 months — a campaign which generated 12,700 messages making it one of the largest we’ve ever run. According to the ITUC, “KESK does consider it [our campaign] to be one of the elements in a whole joint effort which eventually led to the release of several dozens of trade unionists, even if 90 of them remain in jail to date.”

We now have a version of our campaigns that works really well on phones and tablets and expect to go live with it sometime today. (Read more here).

We discovered a problem on our campaigns page — it seemed that quite a large number of people were clicking on the ‘share on Facebook’ link but not actually sending off messages. It may be that the page design was flawed. This has now been fixed (read more here).

We helped the TUC with a special mailing to our UK list about their online campaign to pressure the Gap and Debenhams to sign up to the Bangladesh Accord.

News: We’ve made some fixes to our various pages, including these:

A country page (e.g., the UK) that is supposed to show one language (e.g., English) will now only show campaigns in that language.

On the French Canadian edition, we’ve now fixed some translation problems Andy reported.

We’ve made some steps forward on the Turkish and other editions getting them ready for launch using the new format for all languages.

We fixed a glitch that was sorting some news stories on the country pages in the wrong order, as Roy reported.

We also dealt with the problem of a state/province appearing on the wrong country page, discovered by Derek.

And finally, we made the photo of the day and the campaign photo appear on the front page with the same width for each one, so the page won’t appear to be lop-sided.

Berlin 2014: We’ve been in touch with the ITUC this week about coordinating our efforts.

Events: There have been some improvements to the Events module now displayed on the front page of country pages in English. (See here for example.)

We’re not showing old events anymore.

We have a link to show more events if there are any. (This page is being improved to look nicer.)

And we’re currently working on a link to submit events which will appear together with the events.

Publicity: I had articles in Stronger Unions (UK) and Our Times (Canada), both on labour themes. I’ve also been in touch with Equal Times (ITUC) and Neues Deutschland about articles on labour issues.

We’re running an ad campaign on Facebook now — here are the numbers so far: Ad seen by 37,747 people in the UK and Germany; 264 of them have liked our page, bringing the total number of likes up to 6,964.

Books: We’ve sold 251 copies of the Global Labour Movement book so far, plus 18 Kindle editions for a total of 269. This is a slower sale than our previous book, which sold more than 400 copies during the first month. We hope that bulk purchases from unions can help.

Fundraising: We just received a very generous donation of £5,000 from the ITF, and C$500 from Canadian labour lawyers.

Campaigns: As reported below, we closed two big campaigns this week. I also posted below a summary of the results of our recent Philippines campaign – written by the union there. We had a meeting in the LabourStart office with a representative of cleaners in London and are looking forward to creating a UK-only campaign for them in the next few days. Edd and I have both been working on creating a mobile-friendly version of our campaigns and hope to have results in a few days.

Events: We’ve gone live with this new module – see details below. It’s just one more service we offer to the international labour movement and one more reason to visit LabourStart every day.

Publicity: To our surprise, there was a full page in Neues Deutschland about LabourStart this week. This could not have come at a better time as we strive to raise our profile in Germany.

Books: Sales of the Global Labour Movement book rose by just 44 this week, up to 224. The first book (Campaigning online) was doing better at this point. This week, I plugged the book yet again to 12,000 trade unionists on our UK list, but got a minimal response. We’ve now sorted out a Kindle edition of this book and will begin publicizing it. Last week, we arranged for ‘extended distribution’ of both titles, meaning they should be available in many local bookstores and shops other than Amazon. Meanwhile, it turns out that CreateSpace has been very poor about payments to us — we’ve raised this with them and they’re invesigating. The total sales of both titles should have earned us over £720 — but we’d only received about £211 of that so far.

Fundraising: The head of Geneva-based charity that promotes human rights in the workplace visited our offices last week and we discussed a number of areas of possible joint work and funding. I followed this up with a detailed proposal on Friday.

Correspondents: Edd has identified 128 active correspondents who are not on our mailing list. We’ll be following up, trying to make sure that we can email to all correspondents. In addition, he’s written to all UK correspondents to encourage them to be more active, and to tag their stories by region (Scotland, Wales, etc).

From today, all senior correspondents can add events which appear on our front pages.

To do so, when you login you should see this:

Click on that to add an event.

To see all the events that have been added so far, click here.

This is an early version of the events module.  In future we will make it fully multilingual and will open it to non-senior correspondents as well.  It will also eventually have a better way to modify records — at the moment, if you need to make a change you’ll need to delete and then re-add the event.  You can do this from the page where you add an event — see here:

Please do try to add an event and let me know how it goes.  Don’t hesitate to ask if something isn’t clear or if you have any suggestions for improvement.

This was something we tried many years ago under the name ‘Global Labour Calendar’ – it didn’t work then, but today with our very active country pages, we should now be able to serve the labour movement with an online calendar of events.

You can see the first examples by looking at the upper left column on the Canada and UK pages.

There’s a lot more work to do – especially creating a user-friendly interface so people can add events – but we should have a lot more of this done in the next few days.