Inside LabourStart

Twitter: We created a List of global unions and publicised it widely across social media (but not yet in a mass mailing). The list already has 25 followers and we’ve been re-tweeting many of the posts there to boost interest in what the global unions are saying and doing.

Africa: We wrote to all 68 correspondents we identified in 19 countries noting that we’ll hold our first online event with them in January.

Romania: With the agreement of the ETF, we closed down the long-running campaign in support of Bucharest metro workers.  The campaign had nearly 7,800 supporters, making it one of the largest recent campaigns.

Interns: We will be reaching out to labour studies departments looking for recent graduates as potential paid interns (living wage). We have also been approached by GLU to again take interns this coming year.

LabourStartJobs.org: We gave further publicity to this sub-site of LabourStart, which continues to feature jobs in unions in the UK and Canada, with a smattering form elsewhere.  27 jobs were posted here in the first 9 days of December.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by another 143 subscribers this week – 96 of those for the English list.

Podcast: The Union Dues podcast (UK) featuring Eric Lee talking about LabourStart is the third most popular they have ever done, with about 215 listeners. We did a further round of publicity later in the week to boost this a bit.

Africa: Work continues on preparing for our first-ever online meeting of correspondents. We have a tool that will allow our intern to compile a current list of all correspondents for the more than 50 African nations.  It turns out that we have 30 volunteer correspondents in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Nigeria with others scattered across the continent, and it will be good to meet them all — even if the meeting is on Zoom.

Brazil: With the agreement of PSI, we are closing down this campaign after many months.

Colombia: We have been asked to keep this campaign live for a while longer.

Jordan: We had an online meeting with the Education International to discuss next steps in this campaign. These will include online events in English and Arabic and a major effort to ramp up support for the Arabic version of the campaign.

Newswires: We have begun the process of repair, having fixed the Dutch and Norwegian newswires. Many more will be done in the coming days.

Pakistan: We have been asked to keep this campaign live for a while longer; there has apparently been some progress on the ground and the campaign is having an effect.

T-shirts: We did a second mass mailing to promote the t-shirts with Working Class History.  We’ll shortly share the results  — when we get them.

UnionDues podcast: This went live on 30 November. According to their website, it has been downloaded more than 200 times. We gave this podcast extensive publicity, including a mass mailing to our English list. (Our own counter shows just under 500 people clicked on our version of the link to the podcast.)

Jordan: We launched a major new campaign in partnership with the Education International and the support of the ITUC. The campaign had 2,802 supporters after one day online.

Nigeria: We are shortly expecting our first campaign to be translated into Yoruba, and we will publicise that fact widely — we’re to be first global union website campaigning in an indigenous African language. Yoruba, by the way, has about 50 million speakers.

Sudan: We’ve had a lot of coverage of workers’ responses to the military coup, and shared this widely across social media on Wednesday.

Sweden: We’ve had a soft launch for the Zalando campaign now that SAC has begun to promote it, and we will do much more in the coming days.

Zimbabwe: We have a new correspondent who has begun posting news.

Labour newswire: We’ve begun to fix some long term problems here. With the help of a webmaster of a local trade union (scroll to the bottom of the page) in the state of Washington (USA), we managed to fix the state and provincial newswires for the whole world. We’ll fix this on the website and announce, and move on to fix any others that have stopped working.

Mailing lists: These continue to grow slowly. Before the launch of the Jordan campaign, we were able to add just 43 new subscribers to our lists.

Iran campaign: We received a translation of the mailing into Farsi from IndustriALL, and have sent this out to our Farsi list.

Italian edition: We changed one of the permanent links on the home page.

Italy: Eric’s article on the attack on CGIL was shared very widely across social media, including by leading figures on the British Left and Labour Party.

Myanmar campaign: We created a special petition format to allow campaign supporters’ names to be delivered to the credentials committee of the UN General Assembly, at the request of BWI.

Polish: For some time now we have been adding daily news from one of the two Polish national trade union centres (OPZZ) to our Polish-language news page. From this week, we are also adding news from Solidarnosc.  Our campaigns are appearing in Polish, though we still need to sort out regular mailings to our Polish list.

Puerto Rico: We held a webinar in Spanish with English translation in support of the campaign. Despite technical glitches, and thanks to Euan’s efforts at PSI, the webinar had good attendance, especially from Latin America. DSA’s publication, Democratic Left, is running a major piece on the campaign with a link.  With 7,610 supporters, it is our second largest current campaign.

Turkey: At long last, the article about Cihan Erdal and co-authored by Peter Tatchell and Eric Lee, appeared in print in the British daily Morning Star. It was widely shared online.

Interns: We have begun work with a second intern, Bunmi, from York University in Toronto. Our other intern, Cam, has been working on an updated version of our online campaigns book, discovering some good victories that we should publicise.

Italy: The attack on the CGIL headquarters last week by fascist thugs dominates our home page these past few days. We have shared many news stories across social media as well, in English and Italian, and have reached out to global unions regarding a possible campaign (with no positive response so far). Eric also devoted his weekly column for Solidarity to this subject.

Iran: We now have a version of the campaign running in Farsi, thanks to IndustriALL. A followup mailing to the English list last week helped, and the campaign now has 5,308 supporters – a gain of nearly 1,000.

Puerto Rico: Together with UTIER and PSI, we’ll be hosting a live event in support of the campaign later this week. With 7,411 supporters, this is one of our largest recent campaigns.

Sweden: We now have a translation into Swedish of the campaign, which will shortly go live.

UK: We’ve been invited to appear on the ‘Union Dues‘ podcast next month.

Donations: We received a very generous donation from the nurses union in Canada, bringing our total donations this year from Canada to over $20,000.

Interns: We have two new interns from York University in Canada and will be meeting them for the first time today (on Zoom, of course).

Mailing lists: Our largest lists grew by just 81 new subscribers this week.

World Day for Decent Work: We revived our WDDW page from last year, tagged 14 news stories to appear there, and shared this widely across social media.

Iran: We have reached out to IndustriALL who will probably sponsor a campaign with us in support of striking oil workers next week.

Myanmar: The campaign is growing slowly, and after 8 days online has just 3,835 supporters. A followup mailing to some 70,000 names on the English list is going out today. A Burmese language version has been prepared. We asked the global unions if they wanted to host a live event and they are now consulting about this.

Puerto Rico: The campaign went live last Friday and has grown quickly (4,624 supporters in the first 6 days).  As a result, we now have a fairly large number of campaign supporters in Puerto Rico (406 in Spanish and 150 in English). In addition, the union has agreed to hold an online event hosted by LabourStart.

Campaigns: We discovered a bug in the software that showed the wrong error message if you failed to select a country; this has now been fixed.

Intern: We have a new intern working with us from this week – Cam Cannon, from the University of Manitoba, in Canada.

We’re back to weekly updates.

Europe: We’ve asked again to close the Fedex/TNT campaign, which has been running for more than five months and we expect to do so later this week. We don’t know yet what the effect of the campaign has been.

Jordan: At the request of the Education International, we have now closed this campaign — our largest of 2021 with 9,643 supporters. The EI told us: “The outcome was great with the release of the vice President of the Jordanian Teachers Association (JTA) Dr. Nasser Al-Nawasra, declared innocent by the appeal court in Amman last Sunday 11 July as shared previously … We will keep pressure on the Jordanian government in order to reinstate the union.”

Kazakhstan: Our long-running Kazakhstan campaign is also closing this week, though we haven’t yet had the result we wanted.

Ukraine: After ten months, and with no results reported to us, we suspend the Ukraine miners’ campaign.

Fundraising: We did some followup work the European federations two of which have already made generous donations this year – and we expect more.  We continue to receive generous donations from Canadian unions, both national and local.

Interns: It’s looking increasingly likely that we will have one or more student interns from Canada, starting in September.

LabourStart Jobs: Expect more news about this in the coming days – for now, correspondents should note that there’s an option to tag stories which advertise jobs in the labour movement as such. We’ve always posted such stories, but have never collected them in one place, nor made it this easy to tag them.

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.

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.

The top news for us this month was the victories we had in two of our current campaigns — in Kyrgyzstan and Algeria. In the former, the government has withdrawn proposed changes to the labour laws. In the latter, the two women union activists who were jailed have been released. We spread the news of these two wonderful victories widely.

Myanmar: We are in discussions with global unions about a possible campaign.

Norway: We’ve received several generous donations from Norwegian unions this month.

Pakistan: We launched a campaign against union-busting at Metro A.G. in Pakistan, sponsored by UNI Commerce. This campaign features many new languages for us, including Urdu. As of today, it has 5,420 supporters.

Thailand: We have a new volunteer translator for Thai.

USA: We reached out to offer our help to the union organising Amazon workers in the USA.

Correspondents: We held the second correspondents’ meeting on Zoom.

Deliveroo workers: At the request of the ITF, we shared links to their online global campaign to support unionisation at Deliveroo.

International Women’s Day: We posted a lot of news stories, and wrote to all correspondents to encourage them to do so as well, and posted across social media.

Interns: We participated in Cornell University’s career fair for students interested in social justice, speaking with about a half dozen students in individual, short interviews. We will almost certainly hire one of them.

Labour News Network: Work is nearly complete on this project — it will allow correspondents to post news stories which do not currently appear anywhere else on the web. This issue was raised during one of our recent Zoom meetings with the LabourStart community of correspondents and translators.