Inside LabourStart

We launched our Libya campaign in the last week and it already has 4,756 supporters; we’ve gotten it translated into 10 languages.

We closed two campaigns this week, both of which had been running for more than three months – Kazakhstan (6,311 supporters) and Iran (7,659 supporters).

I did my fortnightly review of translations of our campaigns and mass mailings, and have followed up with our volunteer translators where we are not caught up. The more campaigns we run, the harder it is for our translators to do all the work, and we need to find additional volunteers, I think, to help do this.

Some good news: As we launch new campaigns, our mailing lists grow. This week we added 272 new subscribers to the lists.

We need a new LabourStart flyer that everyone can use, and we have a draft nearly ready. If you’re interested in being involved with this, let me know.

We are in the process of preparing a US activists list in part because we’ve not been able to reach out to the US audience before, and also in preparation for participation in the upcoming Labor Notes conference.

• We launched a major new campaign in support of workers in Georgia. It had 5,931 supporters by 12:30 today, and appears in 15 languages. I have encouraged our friends in Georgia to help with a Georgian language translation as well.
• I closed our Cambodia campaign after three months. We’re still waiting to hear from our partners what effect, if any, our effort had.
• We’ve had a problem for some time with our mailings in Germany and have come up with a solution. You’ll notice a small change in how we link to campaigns in future mass mailings — in all languages.
• Derek has been leading a discussion with some of our North American correspondents about a LabourStart presence at next spring’s Labor Notes conference in the U.S.. Andrew has proposed a LabourStart presence at next year’s ACTU congress in Brisbane.
• Our mailing lists grow by 209 this week, all of them new supporters of our campaigns.
• At Derek’s suggestion, I’ve begun a review of all our existing Twitter accounts — some active, some not. We’re going to try to get a grip on these and grow them all, and add new ones.

We have a new campaign in the works, supporting workers in Georgia. We’re waiting for our campaign partners to begin their publicity and then we’ll launch ours, including writing to all our translators.
We’ve also been alerted to an upcoming campaign in support of workers in Bangladesh.
We’ve begun more intensive work on our next book – a second volume of the writings of Dan Gallin. Following up on some problems we had with CreateSpace (Amazon) we may be using an alternative for this one.
I resolved a longstanding problem with the second country names in our news stories not appearing in the edition’s language. This is now fixed.
We added 138 new subscribers to our mailing lists in 7 languages.
Finally, we wrote to our lists about our victories in Mauritius, Egypt and Canada.

Mauritius campaign: This was one of our fastest and most successful. A hunger strike by union leaders and cleaners at schools ended after just a couple of days. We managed to get 5,570 supporters in that short time. We’ve been thanked by the union, and will be reporting on this win (and others) in a mass mailing to our lists today.

Cambodia campaign: This campaign will shortly close, but we were sent some new graphics by the Clean Clothes Campaign which we’ve shared on social media. This did not produce an immediate positive result (new supporters). The campaign is currently our largest with 8,317 supporters.

Georgia campaign: We were asked in a Facebook message to help with a struggle in Georgia and waiting to get details.

Mailing lists: We picked up 251 new subscribers this week.

Fundraising: I spent all day yesterday at a “Crowdfunding Academy” event, learning the basics of crowdfunding.

About page: We’ve done a redesign of this page on the site, and fixed some of the text. Other pages on the site will also need to be updated.

Finally, yesterday evening I was invited to speak for a few minutes at the launch of Space4, a centre for tech cooperatives in North London, and spoke about LabourStart.

This week can celebrate a bit.  We have three victories to report on …

Toronto Pearson Airport campaign: This campaign was a win for the workers and we were glad to help. The strike is now over and the workers have won major concessions from their employer. Details coming soon.

Egypt campaign: Another win as all 9 trade union leaders have been freed from jail (on bail). Kamal Abbas of the CTUWS writes “Dear comrades, Many thanks for your support and solidarity in the LabourStart campaign to release the Egyptian nine Trade Union Leaders.”

Norway campaign: No, you’re not forgetting something. We very nearly had a campaign for Norwegian workers, but the workers won before we had a chance to launch this. (This is not the first time this has happened to us.)

Cambodia campaign: With over 8,200 supporters this is our largest current campaign. We’ve been asked to give it another boost next week with some new graphics supplied by the Clean Clothes Campaign, and will do so. In an effort to boost support for the campaign in its last weeks online, we ran a Facebook ad campaign. The campaign was shown 22,705 times and 375 people clicked on the ad, reaching the campaign page. Of those, only 27 seem to have supported the campaign, at a cost of $3 per additional new supporter — so not a great use of our money.

Indonesia campaign: We did a followup mailing in English to the 72,422 people who received but did not open the previous message. This led to a boost of 1,035 new supporters for the campaign, which is now over 6,000 supporters.

Mailing lists: Our lists continue to grow as we launch new campaigns. We picked up 451 new subscribers this week.

A round-up of what’s been happening at LabourStart this week:

Campaigns:

We launched a major new campaign in support of jailed independent trade unionists in Egypt. After just one day online, the campaign is live in 6 languages (some of these are being uploaded as I write), with over 3,600 supporters.

The campaign in support of Carlos E. Castañeda Ravelo in Colombia which we launched last weekend is in 11 languages and has just over 5,000 supporters.

We have been approached by the ITF to launch a campaign next week in support of Indonesian dockers; more details coming soon.

We received a complaint that the Twitter link on the campaign landing page was not working. I tested this again, and it was.

Mailing lists:

We add 105 new supporters to our mailing lists.

This is the first update in more than two weeks — this was due to my week-long visit to Georgia to launch my book, The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-21.

Campaigns:
We have just launched a new campaign at the request of PSI, in support of a trade union leader in Colombia.

We expect to shortly launch two more campaigns at the request of unions in Egypt and Canada.

We closed one campaign — Freeport Indonesia — that ran for more than three months. This was one of our largest campaigns ever, with nearly 15,000 supporters, many of them from Indonesia.

Our translators are struggling to cope with the load of many simultaneous campaigns and for some of our key languages — the ones with large mailing lists — we are falling behind. I have noted that some of our translators always come through on time, even when we are given four campaigns in as many weeks, and written to those to thank them for their effort.

Mailing list:
We added just 70 new campaign supporters in the last two weeks.

Website redesign:
Our friends at Outlandish, the north London web design workers’ coop, have been doing some work for us (on a pro bono basis) and we expect to hear shortly what they have done so far.

Burma/Myanmar:
We’ve begun the process of changing the country name, first in English. At the moment, both names work and soon searching for one will also show results for the other (in a few days).

Georgia:
I was invited to address the congress of the Georgian Trade Union Confederation and did so last week.

India:
We’re working to build closer links with one of our correspondents who’s created a Facebook page for Indian labour news that has 12,000 followers.

USA:
Derek has been making a huge effort to grow our Twitter feed here.  We’re up to 1,145 followers.

LabourStart TV:
We fixed our home page to highlight when a story is a video — even when it’s a top global news story. There is no longer a need for correspondents to include the word ‘video’ in headlines; but do make sure to tag such stories as videos (on the second screen, when adding news).

UnionBook:
Finally, we are done with this, no longer paying for the domain name.

Jailed trade union leaders in Iran.

New campaign: On 28 August, we launched a new campaign — a joint effort by the Education International and the International Transport Workers Federation — in support of jailed trade unionists in Iran. As I write these words, the campaign has 6,119 supporters.

Mailing lists: We added 569 new subscribers to 15 of our mailing lists; 360 of those were to the English list.

Translations: We have a new volunteer translator for Indonesian. Our Dutch translator has asked for help and we’ve suggested ways to cope with ever-larger numbers of campaigns. It looks like some of our other translators are struggling to cope as we launch more campaigns than ever in August.

Georgia: Eric will speak next week at the Georgian Trade Union Confederation congress. We have been helping publicise statements by the GTUC and its international partners following up on a government crackdown on independent unions, and hunger strike by railway workers.

IUF: We participated in the IUF’s 27th congress all of last week, posting a great deal of material on social media and the website. This was also an opportunity to hold informal discussions with other GUF leaders, and leading trade unionists from a number of countries.

McDonald’s: On the eve of the first-ever strike by McDonald’s workers in the UK, we participated in the demo at the corporate headquarters in north London — and posted many photos to Facebook and Twitter.

We launched two new campaigns this week — Kazakhstan (IndustriALL and ITUC) and Iran (Education International and International Transport Workers Federation).  

The first of these is already in 11 languages and has 4,200 supporters.

(Pictured to the left are Esmail Abdi and Reza Shahabi, the two jailed Iranian trade union leaders, who are the focus of our latest campaign.)

Prior to doing this, we closed the previous Iran campaign which focussed on Esmail Abdi’s hunger strike.

This campaign had 8,410 supporters and ran in 18 languages.

In the UK, we helped to publicise the upcoming strike by McDonald’s workers — including inviting our subscribers to demonstrate at the company’s headquarters in London next weekend.

Having finally caught up with an overflowing inbox, all campaigns and mailings that have been translated have now finally gone live.  Our volunteer translators have been working overtime to keep up with all the new campaigns, and this is greatly appreciated.

Our mailing lists grew by 184 this week due to new supporters for our new campaigns.

I wasn’t able to update this last Friday, as I was travelling, so this update is for the last two weeks. This week it’s mostly about campaigns …

Cambodia campaign: This campaign, launched two weeks ago, is now in 14 languages and has picked up 6,603 supporters. We are hoping for many more, as there’s been very good publicity, especially in Canada. We’ve asked British unions to also get involved, as British retailers are a key target.

Belarus campaign: This campaign, submitted by IndustriALL and the ITUC, went live yesterday (Thursday).

Kazakhstan campaign: We have had a campaign submitted by IndustriALL and the ITUC and we expect it go live tomorrow (Saturday).

Iran campaigns: We’ve been asked to help with a campaign in support of a jailed trade unionist in Iran, but are awaiting a response from the group which is currently promoting this. We’ve asked the Education International for permission to close the existing Abdi campaign as it is out of date.

DNO Yemen campaign: We closed this after more than seven months online, with 9,273 supporters. The campaign appeared in 16 languages. As IndustriALL summarised the result, “DNO has failed to act on your messages. The union has made a complaint against the company to the Norwegian parliament, and an OECD complaint is being filed. Please continue to share the story of how this company has treated its workforce.”

British trade union campaigns: We continue to do promotion for TUC-backed online campaigns. The most recent ones (which we promoted with mailings to our UK list and on social networks) included for the unions Equity (Greenwich Dance) and BECTU (VFX professionals) In addition, the TUC has pledged a donation.

And in other news …

Mailing lists: We picked up 341 new subscribers this week, due to the Cambodia campaign.

Brazil page in Portuguese: We fixed problems with the new photo of the day feature here.

Inside LabourStart: We removed links to older pages which are no longer being updated.

Tagging video stories: We’ve now completed the process, so on all our pages, video stories are appropriately tagged as such, no matter where on the page they appear.