Jul
24
2022
0

The last four months on LabourStart

Because we’re very late with this report, it will be very brief — but should give you a good idea of what LabourStart has been up to in the last four months. Regular updates will resume from next week.

Campaigns

  • We closed the IUF’s Cambodia Nagaworld campaign – it was a win.  We also closed the Lithuania and Colombia campaigns – which we could not declare as victories.
  • We launched a campaign in support of Borjomi water workers in Georgia – and closed it after a couple of days – this was a big win for the workers.  Eric got to spend a day with the strikers during his visit to Georgia in May, where he also met with the Georgian union leadership.
  • In early May, we launched a new campaign in support of jailed union leaders in Belarus – with the help of GLU students.  It is currently our largest campaign, with over 9,700 supporters.
  • We also launched a new campaign on Iran, with the support of the IUF.
  • And we also launched a campaign in support of a jailed trade unionist in Kazakhstan.
  • We launched our first campaign in Armenian, now that the interface has been translated into that language.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023

Discussions begin with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation about holding a conference in Tbilisi in early 2023.

Fundraising

We sent out a fundraising appeal at the beginning of April. We raised over £2,000 in the first 24 hours, and more funds over the course of the following months.

Home page

Due to changes made by our web hosts, IONOS, many records became corrupted and character encoding on our home page broke on 1 July. Following that, we had problems with our jobs page, our photo of the week and our link to Radio Labour. Most of this has now been fixed, and work on this should be completed by 10 August.

Interns

Our three GLU interns finished their work at the end of March.  We were lucky to have Jessica, Malaika and Zubair working with us — albeit for just a few weeks — and thank them for their efforts.

Labour News Network

This was improved with a new banner and with several items posted to it.

Mailing lists

We migrated from Mailchimp to Mailjet in May, saving a lot of money.

May Day

  • We organised a recorded May Day event with the participation of many trade unions from around the globe.
  • There were 649 views of the video as of 2 May, and 500 more since then.
  • We shared many of the individual videos across social media in May.

Social media

UK

Apr
07
2021
0

Kyrgyzstan: We spoke too soon …

We spoke too soon – in Kyrgyzstan, the government has had a change of heart and has passed anti-union laws. We are just about to launch a campaign demanding that the president veto that law.

In other news …

Canada: We’ve done a mailing to our entire global list encouraging submissions to CLIFF, the labour film festival. We received a very generous donation from a Canadian union. And we also launched a new Canada-only campaign.

Israel: We continued with building our mailing list and social media following, writing directly to the more than 500 Hebrew speakers who supported our campaign – which now has just under 7,500 supporters.

Myanmar: We have given extensive publicity to two union fundraisers, organised by DSA in the US, and BWI.

Pakistan: We did more followup mailings to promote our campaign, also to our English, German and French lists.  The campaign has over 7,000 supporters.

Home page: A problem emerged with the ‘more stories’ for country link not working; this has now been fixed.

Interns: We participated in Cornell University’s Social Justice Career Fair and interviewed a number of participants. Three of these were short-listed, they were interviewed, and we took a decision to hire one, who will begin work in June. Our intern Amos, who is studying at the Global Labour University in Berlin, completed his internship with us.

Labour News Network: We have revived this tool which allows LabourStart correspondents to post news stories that have not appeared elsewhere on the web. This is now being beta-tested. More details coming soon.

Mailing list: We added 366 new subscribers from the new campaign supporters, mostly to the English list but also with significant growth for the Dutch list.

May Day: We are working on two events online — a panel discussion focussing on jailed trade union activists around the world, and a possible world premiere online of a major new film about working people (more details soon).

RSS newswires: We have been alerted to the fact that these are broken; we will aim to fix them ASAP.

May
15
2014
1

We come to the rescue of Turkish unions – and revive an important part of LabourStart

lnnI had an email message yesterday from our comrades in Turkey reporting on the deaths of hundreds of miners in Soma, which they posted to their union website in English.  I immediately made it a top global labour news story on LabourStart — and then learned from them that their website had been hacked and their statement was no longer available.

With a general strike looming in Turkey, I asked them to send me the text of their statement — and then I built (from scratch) a new version of our Labour News Network which you can see here:

http://labournewsnetwork.wordpress.com/

This allowed our readers around the world to see the Turkish unions’ statement, even though their own website was down.

The Labour News Network is something we tried some years back as a way to offer unions a way to post content to LabourStart even if they have no website.  It could be particularly useful for reports from the field — e.g., in future worker-correspondents could post reports, including photos and videos, directly from the field.

This is something we can discuss in Berlin and afterwards …

Written by admin in: Labour News Network |

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