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.

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.

Belarus: We continue to ramp up activities in the run up to the 16 April global day of solidarity. This week we publicised our interview with the ITUC’s Luc Triangle. As of this morning, it has been downloaded 104 times.  Our campaign has grown to 4,150 supporters and appears in 14 languages.

Iran: We’ve been invited to speak at an online May Day event organised by emigre groups (on 24.4).  More details soon.

Thailand: With the permission of IndustriALL, we closed our YPC campaign this week.  The campaign had 4,930 supporters and appeared in 16 languages. The campaign did not result in a victory for the workers, unfortunately.

Turkey: It looks like we will launch a new campaign shortly. Meanwhile, Kivanc has a great article in Labor Notes about the Telus struggle.  We’ll be sending out a special mailing to our Canadian list about this.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by 90 new subscribers this week, due to new campaign supporters being added — mostly to the English list.

Android app: We are now in discussions with two developers about this, and are exploring a “no-code” solution as well.

 

What follows is a brief summary of highlights followed by the usual long list of numbers.

SUMMARY:

Our new podcast service is picking up and we have passed the 7000 downloads mark.  Older episodes continue to see new downloads, suggesting that the word is still getting out about the series.

Our first podcast to break the 500 downloads mark dropped in March, an interview with the President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees regarding his union’s reaction to Trump’s threat to ‘annex’ Canada.

We continue to see changes in the mailing lists as the problems that resulted from several mailing service provider changes are corrected but growth has returned.  Spanish has displaced German as our third-largest list.

Our two Bluesky accounts are managed in much different ways.  Sporadic efforts were made the increase the followers of the global accounts which now stands at 15,301, up from 13.2k.  The Canadian English-language account went from 297 to 353.

XTwitter feeds continue to decline.  Most or all of that can be attributed to our followers abandoning the platform for Bluesky and perhaps Mastodon.

Our other numbers remain fairly stable.

THE NUMBERS:

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the last report. Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since our last report.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

STORIES POSTED TO OUR NEWS SITE IN THE LAST MONTH:

3807 (123 per day)-2927 (105 per day)

MAILING LISTS:

The lists are being rebuilt after some technical hiccups so the numbers can be expected to fluctuate considerably over the next month or two.

The top 10:

English: 85126-84862

French: 7089-7075

Spanish: 5566-5553

German: 5522-5511

Turkish: 4503-4460

Korean: 3197

Italian: 2828-2824

Russian: 2677

Norwegian: 2003-1996

Romanian:  1730

Dutch: 1437

The others:

Arabic:  770-763

Belarusian:  299-288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 965-964

Creole:  11

Czech: 58

Danish: 79

Esperanto: 187

Farsi:  164

Finnish:  439

Georgian:  176

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  270

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  172

Indonesian:  385

Japanese: 382

Lithuanian:  62

Malaysian: 20

Polish: 964

Portuguese: 1274

Punjabi:  2

Serbian:  97

Sinhalese: 1

Slovak: 15

Swedish: 909

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  142

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive:  12

Interns and Past Interns:  15

LabourStart Correspondents:  611

LabourStart Translators:  104

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69

Donors:  885

FLICKR:

Members:  838

Photos:  10351-10337

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  133-135

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  14k, details unavailable

Global Labour News and Information: 9.2k

LabourStart UK likes:  2.1k, details unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 620 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 489

LabourStart Brasil:  552

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV likes: 465

LabourStart TV follows:  455

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Italia:  68

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 191

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

LINKEDIN:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2640-2634

Page: 322-317

PODCASTS:

We passed the 5000 downloads mark in January.  By labour podcast standards this is considered more than reasonable given the effort required.

LabourStart is a member of the US-based Labor Radio / Podcast Network.

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the three (3) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. 533 downloads: Interview with Mark Hancock, President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees re. the union’s recently-adopted “Montreal Declaration” which was drafted in response to US President Donald Trump’s threats against Canada.
2. 424-423 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
3. 321-320 downloads: Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)

BLUESKY:

As an experiment we created a global news in English feed mid-November.  The account is growing far more quickly than any other of our social media accounts ever did.  A Canadian English-language feed was added in late December.

Our Mastodon experience, as with most people’s, was not great as the initial excitement wore off quite quickly.  That does not appear to be happening with Bluesky.

No concerted effort was made to grow either account last month.

Global English-language: 16.5k-15301

Canada-English-language: 378-353

X (TWITTER as-was):

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  If we wish to maintain our footprint we will have to start doing so again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.  Whether that is possible is another question given the current flight of users from the platform.

We experienced decline in all accounts except the Australian, which grew slightly.  Prior to the exodus to Bluesky all would have usually experienced slow growth without any effort on our part.  This is almost certainly the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Bluesky or Mastodon).

Global English: 36303-36431

Canada English: 20202-20949

Global Portuguese: 9925-9956

Global Spanish: 10247-10265

Australia: 9422-9702

USA: 4683-4708

Canada French: 3101-3107

Russian: 50

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329-330 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 224 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

South Asia (English): 28 Placeholder and not yet active.

Belarus: Our new campaign is now live and translations are pouring in. As fo 14:00 GMT today, the campaign (in English only) had 1,825 supporters — that’s after just one day online. Eric’s article on Belarus was widely circulated and will help to raise awareness of the campaign.

Nike: Our campaign in support of Asian women who work for Nike is going live in the next day or two. This is our first partnership with Global Labor Justice.

Other campaigns: We may be shortly launching a campaign in support of striking workers in the US. Details soon.

Swag: We have found a good, left-wing, unionised provider in the UK and are aiming to get new t-shirts, mugs and maybe caps ready in the next few weeks. We sold 597 of our previous t-shirts, earning £4,250 and hope to raise the same amount — or more — with the new products.

Podcasts: It looks like our next interviews will be with a leading Canadian trade unionist and with the people organising an international conference on strikes taking place later this month. (We will also interview some of the participants in that conference.). If you have any suggestions for people for us to interview, please get in touch!

Donations: We continue to be impressed with support from many individuals but also from their unions. We’ve received generous donations in the last few weeks from IndustriALL global union, the Education International, BCGEU (Canada) and Styrke (Norway).

Mailing lists: The lists continue to grow as new campaigns bring in new supporters. We added 67 new subscribers to the lists just before going live with our Belarus campaign — which will no doubt bring in more.

 

Campaigns: We launched our first campaign of 2025 — in support of Telus workers in Turkey. As of today, the campaign appears in 13 languages and has 3,089 supporters.

Podcasts: We posted our third podcast of 2025, an interview with Kivanç Eliaçik, Director of International Relations Department for DISK. It is already the most popular podcast we did this year. We are hoping to record and share another podcast next week. In addition, one of our volunteers is readying our first long-form podcast.

News: In the first 21 days of February, our volunteer correspondents posted 2,253 new stories, an average of 107 per day.

Webinar: Three members of the LabourStart Executive spoke at the recent webinar on “Trade union struggles in authoritarian regimes”. We were informed that half of the participants — perhaps more — came due to the publicity we did for the event.

Syria: We had an online meeting with three leaders of the union of teachers in north and east Syria and followed this up by email.

Instagram: We revived our account there, and have gone up from 596 followers to 662, an increase of 11%.

Fundraising: We discovered that supporters in New Zealand have been unable to donate using PayPal and have changed our page to reflect this. We are now looking into alternatives.

Women workers at Nike: We supported the campaign launched by Global Labor Justice and managed to increase the number of pledged supporters by nearly 60%.

YoungWorkers.org: We publicly launched this new site this week with posts to social media and a mention in our mass mailing to the English list.

Mailings: We picked up 139 new subscribers this week, many of them for our Turkish list.

 

Podcasting: We will resume interviews in January. Derek and Pat have some ideas in Canada. If others have suggestions, please let me know. According to Buzzsprout, which hosts our podcasts, in 2024 we were in the top 25% of all podcasts and we had listeners in 117 countries. With a bit of a push we can probably make it to the top 10% in 2025.

Thailand campaign: Just eight days ago this was our smallest campaign with 3,842 supporters. It has picked up 982 new supporters in the last week and is 176 supporters shy of 5,000 today.

Turkey campaign: Slow growth this week as support rises by just 64. Ismet has been hospitalised and we’ve asked if we should use that to focus more attention on his situation.

Urdu: We’re making final tweaks to ensure that our campaigns display correctly in Urdu. For 70 million people, Urdu is a mother tongue and this is a big step forward for us.

Amazon: We contacted the union in New York City offering help again, but receive no reply yet. Meanwhile, we’ve shared UNI’s statement about Amazon strikes in the USA and Germany.

Mailing lists: Slow growth this week as we picked up just 35 new subscribers (24 of those for the English list).

Recruiting new correspondents: Our mailing last week to our 459 email subscribers in South Africa did not generate any response, even though 41 of those opened the message and 11 clicked on the link to become correspondents. We’ll be writing to those 11 next weekm to see if we can help them to sign up.

Well, it’s been two weeks, actually. And there’s a lot to report, so here goes:

Recruiting new correspondents: This is a priority for us and we’re going to tackle it one country at a time. This week we wrote to our 459 email subscribers in South Africa asking them to check out our news page and to apply to be correspondents.

Turkey campaign: This has been growing, now with 4,510 supporters. The campaign appears in 21 languages, which is a lot for us. Among these is Urdu, for the very first time, I think. We also picked up over 100 new subscribers to our mailing list from Turkey in a recent update.

Thailand campaign: Yesterday this was our smallest current campaign, with just 3,842 supporters. But a follow-up mailing to the English list meant we picked up over 700 new supporters and are now up to 4,563 — surpassing the Turkey campaign. This campaign now appears in 14 languages, with more on the way.

Social media: Our home page now features links to all five of our active social media accounts, including the newest – Bluesky, and we’ve dropped links our inactive Instagram and Mastodon accounts.

Donations: We are waiting on one pledged donation and we are hoping for one more that we applied for. In early January, we will have to chase after major union donors and individuals if we are to stay secure for the next few months.

Germany: The teachers’ union GEW asked us to design a postcard (colour, two-sided) which we did and got the short text translated into German. They will be printing this out and distributing it to everyone attending the union’s conference next month. GEW already made a generous donation to us in 2023.

This month we return to reporting mailing list numbers.  Over the next few months we will likely see large changes in the numbers as the problems that resulted from several service provider changes are corrected.

Also this month we start reporting on the Bluesky account which was created mid-month.  Currently we have just one Blusky account, a Global news feed in English, but if the site continues to grow others will be added.

As of this month we will be reporting stories posted.

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the last report. Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since our last report.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

 

STORIES POSTED TO OUR NEWS SITE:

3166 (105.5 per day)

 

MAILING LISTS:

The lists are being rebuilt after some technical hiccups so the numbers can be expected to fluctuate considerably over the next month or two.

The top 10:

English: 84800-84014

French: 7642

German: 5503-5957

Spanish: 5979

Turkish: 4367-4426

Korean: 3321

Italian: 2819-3117

Russian: 2672-2702

Norwegian: 1996-2232

Romanian:  1730-1771

Dutch: 1437-1536

The others:

Arabic:  763-821

Belarusian:  288-293

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 964-902

Creole:  11

Czech: 58-61

Danish: 79-93

Esperanto: 187-190

Farsi:  164-207

Finnish:  438-476

Georgian:  176-156

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  270-295

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  169-186

Indonesian:  385-460

Japanese: 382-398

Lithuanian:  62-63

Malaysian: 20-21

Polish: 964-970

Portuguese: 1274-1292

Punjabi:  2

Serbian:  97

Sinhalese: 1

Slovak: 15

Swedish: 909-950

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  142-152

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  14

LabourStart Correspondents:  608-677

LabourStart Translators:  104-97

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69-51

Donors:  885

 

FLICKR:

Members:  840

Photos:  10366-10225

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  131

 

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  14k, details unavailable

Global Labour News and Information: 9188-9161

LabourStart UK likes:  2k-2.1k, details unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 607 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 495

LabourStart Brasil:  550-547

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV likes: 462-443

LabourStart TV follows:  455-465

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 188-176

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

 

LINKEDIN:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2636-2623

Page: 318-305

 

PODCASTS:

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the three (3) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

PODCASTS:

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the three (3) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. 412 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
2. 315 downloads: Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)
3. 296 downloads: Interview with Judith Kirton-Darling, General Secretary of IndustriAll Europe.

 

BLUESKY:

As an experiment we created a global news in English feed earlier this month.  The account is growing far more quickly than any other of our social media accounts ever did.

Our Mastodon experience, as with most people’s, was not great as the initial excitement wore off quite quickly.  That does not appear to be happening with Bluesky.

Global English-language: 5.9k, details unavailable.

 

X (TWITTER as-was):

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  If we wish to maintain our footprint we will have to start doing so again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.

We experienced some decline in accounts that usually experience slow growth.  This may be the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Bluesky or Mastodon).

Global English: 37321-38245

Canada English: 21637-22574

Global Portuguese: 10131-10381

Global Spanish: 10835-10503

Australia: 9695-10133

USA: 4805-5035

Canada French: 3199-3313

Russian: 49

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329-330 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 224 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

South Asia (English): 28 Placeholder and not yet active.

 

 

New logo: We needed a generic logo to use on our social media accounts and had our graphic designer modify an existing one we used. We think the new logo actually looks pretty good.

Bluesky: Last week we reported that in our first week using the new platform we picked up over 3,000 supporters. Today, that’s nearly doubled to over 5,800 followers. We’ve shared 265 posts so far and many of them are being liked and passed on. That’s a lot more than most other Bluesky accounts belonging to global unions. Of the ones we could find, they ranged from 188 to 1,000 followers — but these numbers will certainly grow. To help them grow their followings, this week we also created our first “starter pack” on Bluesky, listing all the global and European union federations with a presence on the new platform. We publicised this widely and will be creating more such “packs”. If you want to help, get in touch.

Mailing lists: As part of an effort to allow segmentation of our lists to work, which requires that we ‘tag’ each email subscriber with their country names, we’ve been adding thousands of new subscribers and tagging many existing ones. As a result, for example, we now have a mailing list for the USA with over 13,500 subscribers. We’re doing this country by country, starting with the English-speaking ones. This will allow for much more targetted mailings.

Donations: Unions and individuals continue to respond generously to our appeal. This week NITO, the Norwegian union for engineers and technicians, told us that they honoured Thomas Seltzer and gave him a NOK 50,000 prize — which he donated in full to LabourStart.

KESK campaign: We did a lot to grow this campaign this week. It grew to 3,870 supporters and appears in 14 languages, with more coming.

Thailand campaign: This new campaign also saw growth last week and now has 3,295 followers. It appears in 11 languages with more on the way.