Inside LabourStart

Fundraising: Appeals have gone out to most of our lists and we are getting a good response both from individuals and some unions. According to PayPal, we have taken in £6,825.26 in the last 30 days, which is very good and most of that in the last 7 days. An additional £281.45 came in as bank transfers — we expect more, as quite a few requests for our bank details have come through, especially from Germany. In addition to raising more money, we are cutting costs. We will be migrating from MailChimp to another company, saving about 66% per month.

Interns: We have prepared a (partial) list of all our interns over the last decade or so, and will be reaching out to them. This is a group of talented, committed young people who have already worked with us and in some cases remain engaged already.

Programming:

• Another problem on our home page had been pointed out — when ‘all languages’ was selected for a country news page, it would only show the English story as the top story on the page. This has now been fixed.
• In addition, the home page in English has been tweaked to make the donation link more prominent and to remove the redundant link to our podcasts.
• We heard of a problem with the ‘today in labour history’ content which appears on the bottom of our country pages, but we cannot reproduce the problem.

Campaigns: Still no campaigns have been proposed to us. We looked into doing a campaign on Guatemala where a union leader has been killed and are waiting to hear back. This week, we also wrote to all LabourStart correspondents and translators asking for their help to find new campaigns for us.

News: In the first three weeks of June, 35 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,392 news stories — on average, 114 per day. This is an increase since last week.

LabourStart has been lucky to have had some outstanding interns over the last decade or more, and for the last few months — starting in September 2023, we have had four exceptionally talented young people working with us.

David came to us through the Global Labour University (GLU); he is a labour lawyer from Colombia and was very helpful with many projects, including an upcoming campaign in the city of Medellin.

We had three interns from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) — Isabel, Erin and Salomée.  They all did excellent work on a number of projects as well as helping us with translations into Korean and French.

We will continue to work with GLU and the ILR school, as well as others, to help introduce a new generation of activists to the international trade union movement.

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

• A new Twitter account was created – https://twitter.com/LabourSouthAsia
• Our YouTube channel was revived to accommodate the May Day videos.

UK

• Invited by the TUC, Eric spoke with campaigns and communications staffers from several unions on a Zoom call.
• We participated for the first time in the Tolpuddle festival – Derek and Eric spoke in one session, LabourStart had a stall, we gave out hundreds of leaflets, and distributed some copies of our book on migrant workers.

ILO: We gave extensive publicity on LabourStart’s home page and across social media to some key developments at the meeting of the ILO Governing Body last week — including the passage of a resolution on Ukraine and Russia, and the election of a new, union-backed Director General.

GLU conference: At the request of the Global Labour University we have helped to promote their annual conference with a mass mailing to our list. It appears that nearly 500 people from our list clicked through to learn more about or register for the conference.

Interns: Tomorrow marks the final day at work for our three interns from the Global Labour University – Jessica, Malaika and Zubair. We cannot thank them enough for all that they did during their time with us.

Donations: We received a generous donation from Industriall Europe.

T-shirts: We promoted the latest Working Class History t-shirt of the month across our social media accounts.

Campaigns: Last week I reported that we had 3 campaigns in the pipeline, including ones for Colombia and Lithuania. Those both went live this week. The Colombia campaign is already in 16 languages and has 4,455 supporters.

As for the campaign we expected on Turkey — there’s no news at the moment.

But in addition we have received proposed campaigns from the Hungarian teachers union and EPSU, the European regional body for public sector workers.

The Cambodia campaign has grown a bit from 12,355 supporters to 12,995, a gain of 640 supporters this week.

Interns: Our three new interns from the Global Labour University – Jessica, Malaika and Zubair – began work on Wednesday this week.

Campaigns: We expect to launch campaigns shortly in support of workers in Colombia, Lithuania and Turkey. Details soon.

Algeria: With the agreement of IndustriALL we have now closed this campaign. Unfortunately, our comrade Ramzi is still in jail. The struggle continues.

Cambodia: We wrote to dozens of our translators in six languages — resulting in three more translations. But we still have nothing in Japanese, Arabic and Swedish, which is a problem. The campaign continues to grow — now in 22 languages with 12,355 supporters. But growth has slowed.

Iran: At the request of some comrades, we shared statements from Iranian workers’ organisations about expelling Iran from the ILO with senior figures in the global unions.

Jordan: Next month we will host (and promote) a major global webinar in support of Jordan’s embattled teachers’ union. We will reactivate the online campaign before then.

Fund raising: Two unions in Norway made generous donations last week.

Interns: Our three new interns will start their work on Wednesday next week.

Mailing lists: Our mailing lists continue to grow due to the Cambodia campaign – we picked up 223 new subscribers this week, and doubled the size of our small Hindi language list.

Internationalisation: We made a number of improvements to the Russian language home page, adding corrections to the language and replacing the occasional English phrase with the Russian equivalent.

Working Class History T-shirts: We discussed next steps with our friends at DNA-Merch and received payment for the few shirts we sold.

Cambodia: Our campaign continues to grow – we are nearly at 12,000 supporters with translations into 20 languages. It appeared in additional languages last week including Sinhalese, Indonesian, Hindi, Thai and Punjabi. We will be following up regarding missing translations later today – including Korean, Japanese, Swedish, Finnish, etc.  Eric Lee’s article on the struggle in Cambodia was shared widely.

Colombia: We expect a new campaign to be launched next week.  Details coming soon.

Myanmar: We publicised our news page on the first anniversary of the military coup – http://www.labourstart.org/go/1year. We also participated in an online event in support of a brands boycott of Myanmar, as proposed by the unions there.

Other Campaigns: We closed the Jordan teachers and Puerto Rico electrical workers campaigns this week.

Interns: We are down to three interns from the Global Labour University coming on board in mid-February as two have chosen to do their internships elsewhere.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by 496 this week — due entirely to the fast-growing Cambodia campaign.

T-shirts: We apparently helped to sell 18 Rosa Luxemburg t-shirts last month.

Cambodia: Our campaign had more than 10,000 supporters by mid-day — our largest campaign in several years. One result of this has been a big increase in the size of our mailing lists. Another is that the company has been forced to make a rare public pronouncement insisting that they are not busting unions (they are).

Colombia: We have a draft campaign in the works, probably to go live next week. The previous campaign is now closed.

Latin America: We have plans to hold an online regional meeting of LabourStart correspondents – details coming soon.

Thailand: We had a long online chat with the Solidarity Centre staff there to discuss cooperation, including future campaigns together.

Donations: We received a very generous donation from the BC Government Employees union in Canada.

Interns: We will be having five interns from the Global Labour University and are currently planning their projects.

T-shirts: We did an unprecedented second mass mailing promoting the Rosa Luxemburg shirts. With fingers crossed, we hope to have helped sell a few. We should have an update next week.

Cambodia: We launched a major new campaign with the support of the IUF. As of right now, the campaign has 4,700 supporters and appears in ten languages.

Donations: PSI has made another generous donation to LabourStart.

Interns: We interviewed five potential interns from the Global Labour University and have decided to take them all. They will begin work in mid-February for about six weeks.

Our next book: Good progress is being made on our next book, an updated version of our ‘Campaigning Online and Winning’ book from several years ago.

T-shirts: We continued with weekly publicity across social media and next week we’ll include a reminder in the mass mailing as well. This month’s shirt featuring Rosa Luxemburg should prove more popular than the previous ones, we think.

Cambodia: Striking workers at NagaWorld band together to protect union leaders from further arrests.

Cambodia: We expect to shortly launch a campaign in support of jailed casino union leaders.

Iran: Our three-month-old campaign has now been closed in all languages.

Kazakhstan: Following the release of jailed union leaders, a decision was taken not to launch a LabourStart campaign at this time. However, the ITUC did issue a strong statement which we shared widely on our news pages and across social media.

Fundraising: We now have a draft letter and have reached out to a couple of global unions which donated during this quarter last year.

Interns: The Global Labour University has put us in touch with five students; we will be interviewing them all early next week.

T-shirts: We did a second round of publicity to promote the Rosa Luxemburg t-shirt, across social media. Later in the month, we’ll send out a mass mailing as well.