Inside LabourStart

This week we were able to focus on two major events on the labour calendar around the world: International Workers’ Memorial Day and May Day. Our coverage of both events was exemplary, with hundreds of stories posted.

In the run up to May Day, Eric was invited to be on a panel with Iranian emigre activists focussing on workers’ struggles in the Islamic Republic. Here is what he said.

We created a shortlist of six students from Cornell University who have applied to be interns this coming fall. We will interview them all next week. Thanks to Derek, Penny and Isabel for helping to review all the applicant submissions.

And a special thanks to Isabel who has now completed her second internship with LabourStart.

Our mailing lists continue to grow, picking up 159 new subscribers this week — mostly for the English list.

And finally, we signed up one new correspondent from the USA and have just received an application from another one, in Nigeria.

Azerbaijan campaign: This now appears in 11 languages with more on the way, and has 2,876 supporters. That number will grow as mailings in the additional languages go out, and following a reminder message to the English list going out later today. This is our first campaign to appear in Azeri and we now have a (small) mailing list for the first time in that language. We got some wonderful publicity about the campaign on this important news site covering the South Caucasus region: International labour movement launches campaign to free detained labour activists in Azerbaijan

Turkey (teachers) campaign: This appears in 13 languages and already has 3,265 supporters which is expected to grow significantly for the same reasons mentioned above.

Alamo Cinema campaign: The union sent us this – “Labourstart proved to be a helpful ally during our strike and we appreciate the work they do and they support they give.” We will share this with our supporters today.

Iran: Yesterday Eric Lee spoke on a panel on a dissident, pro-democracy Iranian TV channel (broadcasting from outside the country). Among other participants in the event was teacher trade unionist Esmail Abdi, who was subject of more than one LabourStart campaign following his arrests.

Interns: Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labour Relations has found 14 students to apply to be a LabourStart correspondent this fall. We have reviewed the applications and created a shortlist of six and will begin interviews next week.

Podcasts: We interviewed US trade unionist Debbie Goldman who has written a book, Disconnected, about organising call centre workers in the US. That interview already has a significant number of downloads even though we haven’t really done a lot of publicity yet. Our podcast page on Buzzsprout now features a significantly longer “podroll” than before. If anyone wants to suggest other union podcasts to include here, please let us know.

USA: We wrote to the Solidarity Center, which has brought legal action against the Trump administration for cutting off their funds, offering to help in any way we can, and reminding them how helpful the Solidarity Center was with our most recent Global Solidarity Conference in Tbilisi.

Donors: We have just under 1,000 people on our new donors’ mailing list, and are regularly sending them updates which are NOT appeals for more money. One of these updates went out earlier this week.

It’s been a busy week.

Azerbaijan campaign: This has now gone live in English and Azerbaijani versions. We will send it out for translation into more languages on Monday.

Belarus campaign: LabourStart activists participated in the ITUC-hosted webinar to mark the global day of action. We reached out to all participants and managed to get commitments from several to boost awareness of the campaign. We also got translations done into Polish and Romanian. This is our largest current campaign with 4,374 supporters.

New York City Alamo campaign: This ended in a victory for the workers, which we shared on our news page, across social media and in a mass mailing. Our campaign has now been shut down.

Nike campaign: We closed this down after Global Labor Justice gave us permission to do so. The results of the campaign were somewhat disappointing.

Turkey – teachers campaign: This campaign also went live this week, in English and translations have now begun coming in.

Turkey – Telus/TikTok campaign: We did a dedicated mailing to our Canadian list (Telus is a Canadian company).

Older campaigns: We’ve closed down all the remaining campaigns from 2024. In most cases, unfortunately, the campaign partners did not respond to our messages, so we don’t know the results of our effort.

Ukraine: There are reports that some FPU leaders are under house arrest. We reached out to learn more, but there is almost nothing in English online.

Dutch LabourStart: We had a 30 minute call with one of our few remaining active correspondents in the Netherlands and discussed reviving our Dutch language page.

News: There was a small problem – when a story was tagged with two countries, and given a higher priority, that wasn’t taken into account on the second country’s page. This has now been fixed. We’ve also removed links to sign up to our mailing list (which could only be found on the state/province news pages.) Nearly everyone who joins our list does so by signing up to a campaign.

Interns: Cornell University has sent on details of 14 prospective interns.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew again this week by 100 — 89 of them for the English list.

Podcasts: We’re arranging an interview with a former union official in the US who has written a book about call centre workers.

Podcasts: We launched one new podcast this week (Nilufar Mammadrzayeva from Labor Desk in Azerbaijan) and recorded another to be released next week (Luc Triangle from the ITUC on Belarus).  Meanwhile our interview with Mark Hancock from CUPE (Canada) is our most popular one so far, with 529 downloads.  See all our podcasts here.

Social media: We went live with our WhatsApp channel which is starting with 20 subscribers.  I would not be surprised if this soon grows to be larger than our Telegram channel with its 134 subscribers.

Campaigns:  We’ve written to our partners for our five oldest campaigns and will soon be closing these.  We hope to launch our Azerbaijan campaign next week.

Donations: We received a very generous donation from EPSU this week.

Interns: We heard from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labour Relations (USA) and they are keen for us to take on new interns.  We’ll begin interviewing candidates next week.  Meanwhile our current intern, Isabel, who also started as Cornell intern for us, will be finishing her work with LabourStart at the end of this month.

International Women’s Day: First of all, greetings to all working women from LabourStart! Our Working Women’s news page is absolutely full of news this year – check it out: https://www.labourstart.org/women/

Belarus: We are almost certainly going ahead with a campaign in the next few weeks. We also shared our interview with Liza, which went live this week — it already had 175 downloads, which is the same as last year’s interview. It will certainly reach a much larger audience this year.

Podcast interviews: We continue to search for interviewees, including folowing up with trade union leaders who have already agreed to do this.

Interns: Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations has asked if we want more interns this coming all. We said yes.

Young workers: Our Young Workers news page now has a “toolkit” for young trade unionists (mostly for the USA).

Swag: We’re looking for partners to help us produce and sell LabourStart branded products like t-shirts and mugs. Finding ones that are unionised is harder than you’d think. One UK-based company which initially looked like a good fit — “Certified Organic Products; Powered by Renewable Energy; Circular Design” — whose customers included a wide range of progressive charities and NGOs turns out to have a non-union workforce, which is a deal-breaker for us.

International Union Rights: We are probably going to try again to promote sales of this excellent journal, in a partnership with ICTUR. Apparently, it did quite well last time for them and for us.

Instagram: We have our first reel (video) and it’s gotten quite a few views (256). This is quite good considering that we only have 689 followers on the platform.

Fund-raising: Another generous donation from a Norwegian union arrived this week.

Inside LabourStart: We’ve had to disable the mailing list plugin for this blog as it had stopped working properly. We’ll find new ways of letting people know when the blog is updated.

Subscribe to this blog and get weekly updates from us. Fill in the box on the top right side of this page.

Podcasts: We posted our second podcast of 2025 this week (interview with ICTUR’s Daniel Blackburn) and recorded our third — an interview with our own Kivanc from DISK Turkey, which will go live next week. Our 30.1 interview with Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage has already been downloaded 155 times in its first week online, which is already more popular than six of our earlier interviews. Our most popular podcast was downloaded 421 times.

Campaigns: We are just about to launch our first campaign of 2025 — possibly as early as today — with a couple more in the pipeline.

News: Our correspondents posted 817 news stories in the first 7 days of this month, or 117 news stories per day. The average number of news stories posted each day continues to rise. We wrote to all 858 inactive correspondents; as a result, a couple asked to be removed from the database, while others asked to be given new passwords. We will continue efforts to get our existing correspondents to be active, while also recruiting new ones.

Webinar: We are supporting the webinar on “Trade union struggles in authoritarian regimes” taking place next week. Three members of the LabourStart Executive will be speaking at the event. We did a dedicated mass mailing to promote the webinar and extensive publicity across social media, as well as making it our top priority global news story.

ICTUR: Following up on our podcast interview with ICTUR’s Daniel Blackburn, we had a meeting with him to discuss future collaboration with LabourStart. In the past, we partnered with ICTUR to promote their journal International Union Rights, and may do so again this year.

Syria: We have a call scheduled for next week with a teachers’ union in northern and eastern Syria. This is our first contact with Syrian trade unionists, who reached out to us.

Instagram: We’re going to resume promoting our content on Instagram as our old/new intern Isabel will be taking this on. We have 596 followers on Instagram and can grow this number if we make an effort.

Subscribe to this blog and get weekly updates from us. Fill in the box on the top right side of this page.

Podcasting: Our first podcast interview this year has gone live (thanks Pat!), a second one has been recorded and a third interview is scheduled for Monday. We are on course for one podcast interview every week in 2025, which will be great. This week we also fixed a bug — all the non-English LabourStart home pages were showing a wrong link for the podcasts. (Thanks Espen for pointing this out.)

Campaigns: We have several in the pipeline, including in Turkey, Thailand, Myanmar and Liberia. More details soon.

Fundraising: All the translations of our fundraising message have gone out, but the total income has not increased significantly. We will do a followup mailing to the English list which should help.

Next generation: We held a meeting with former interns and have begun work on a Young Workers news page. One of our interns, Isabel, is back with us for three months, starting this week.

News: With well over 3,000 news stories posted this month, we’re averaging over 104 per day — a very big increase compared to the first nine days of January when the average was just 78 per day. The number of active correspondents is growing, up 15% compared to last month. Our goal is to increase the number of active correspondents three-fold this year, so we are on course.

Correspondents: We have a new form and it works. We signed up three new correspondents this week — from Georgia, Ireland and Spain. We also reached out again to our lists in South Africa and Ireland in an attempt to recruit more correspondents; other countries will follow now that we see the form is working.

News: We added about 720 news stories in the last week, which is a signficantly higher number per day than we were experiencing earlier this month. The number of active correspondents this month is up by 10% compared to last month and we expect that to grow.

Podcasting: We’ve lined up the first three podcasts for 2025, starting next week. Please suggest more names for people for us to interview — we want, if possible, to do one show every week.

Fundraising: In the last week, due to fundraising messages to our supporters, we raised £2,021.88. We also received a pledge of £2,809.22 from a union in Canada. We also received a €400 donation from a Danish union. So, a very good week for us. (But we also got our tax bill, which wipes out a lot of that gain.)

Next generation: We polled our former interns and will have our next online meeting next week.

Subscribe to this blog and get weekly updates from us. Fill in the box on the top right side of this page.

Due to my absence on honeymoon, this report is delayed by about a week. It’s been a busy time for LabourStart.

Podcasts: We are resuming our podcasts, interviewing comrades in Belgium and Taiwan, linked to new campaigns we have launched (more below).

New campaigns: We launched a campaign in support of transport workers in Poland submitted by the European Transport Workers Federation. As Eric was absent during this period, Derek and Espen took up the slack and launched the campaign. Earlier in the month we launched a campaign in support of maritime workers in Taiwan, who are on strike. This campaign is our first in a very long time to appear in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese.  We are currently running eight (8) campaigns, which is nearly a record for us and which follows a long dry spell.  The largest of these is from India, with 4,714 supporters after less than four weeks online.

Languages: We now have a framework for campaigns in Tamil, and our first campaign running in that language.

Donations: The German education workers union GEW made a substantial donation as did the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and IndustriAll Europe.  But our financial situation remains quite difficult for now.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew this month, with the English list picking up 326 new subscribers and the Chinese list getting 119, with smaller numbers for the other lists. We also did our first mailing on Mailjet using segmentation, targetting people who have not clicked on a link in our messages.

Labour News Network: We ook another step toward revitalising this little-used part of our website — we published Espen’s report on South Sudan here.

Interns: Four of our former interns showed an interest in continuing to work with each other and with us. Next month we’ll try to organise an online meetup of all the interns we’ve had over the last 12 years.

We missed last week’s update because I was getting married.  We will probably miss next week’s too, as I’ll be on my honeymoon.  But for now, here’s a short update of the highlights from the last two weeks:

New campaign: We launched a major new campaign in support of garment workers in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.  After less than two days online, the campaign had over 3,000 supporters which is very fast growth for us.  (The fact that it is no longer August and union offices have re-opened may have helped.)  The campaign appears in eight languages — includind Indonesian and Serbian — with more in the pipeline.  We are expecting this campaign to also appear in Tamil and are awaiting translation; this will be our first campaign in that language.  We’re also hoping to get a podcast interview done for this campaign next week and are waiting to hear back from our partners.  We currently have 6 active campaigns online.

Translators: For the first time, we had an online meetup of our Translators.  About 12 came, nearly all of them active translators, and of those there were three translators for German, which had been until recently a problematic language for us (no consistent translation).  It was a very good meeting and it will not be the last time we meet as a group.

Interns: We also reached out this week to the 16 individuals who we have identified so far (there may be a few more) who have been LabourStart interns since 2012.  A couple have already responded positively and this is a very welcome development.

Finances: Finally, this week we were able to report on a worsening financial situation for LabourStart, and we reached out to our union partners as well as the more than 700 people who regularly donate.   (Our donors’ mailing list is something very new for us.)  Even though we have not yet reached out to our public mailing lists about this, this week we raised £2,430 and received pledges totalling another £1,688, so well over £4,000 in just 7 days.  But that level of donations has to continue for a little while in order to restore some stablity and to ensure that we meet our spending commitments — which was not the case in early September.