Inside LabourStart

Campaigns: We’ve given our Georgia campaign a boost in a mass mailing; it is our smallest current campaign with just over 4,100 supporters. We’ve also helped to raise money for the strikers there via the UNI website, and we made a donation on behalf of LabourStart. We’ve been approached about possible campaigns this week in Turkey and Uganda. We also asked about a possible campaign on Iran.

Podcasts: We interviewed one of the Evolution Gaming strikers this week — our first podcast in several weeks.

Mailing lists: In the course of moving back and forth between systems, we lost the country names for a lot of subscribers. But now we’ve written software that reads through our campaign supporters database and updates our mailing list — and tested this on our Canadian supporters. It turns out the 20% of our mailing list are Canadians. This allows us to do targetted mailings based on country.  Our list has grown significantly as well with almost 6,000 new subscribers, all from Canada, being added. We will do this for other countries as well.

Mailings: We did three mailings to our English list this week, which is a lot for us. These included promotions for the winners of the LabourStart CLIFF video award, the Arthur Svensson international prize for trade union rights, and our latest podcast (see above).

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted 1,432 news stories in the first 14 days of November, averaging over 100 per day. Unfortunately, only 32 correspondents were active during this period and we need to find way to reactivate the many inactive ones — and recruit new ones.

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.

Our news feed on Telegram.

New campaign coming: It looks like we have a new campaign coming very soon, this time from India. It will join the five campaigns we’ve launched in the last six weeks.

Telegram: We’re making a push to grow our number of followers on Telegram, and have widely shared that fact across social media.

Translators: We’re planning an online meeting of all LabourStart’s volunteer translators. You’ve all been sent a link to our Doodle poll so that we can agree the best time to meet — please fill that in if you’ve not yet done so. We’ve just added new volunteers for Bahasa and Serbian language translations.

Podcasts: We’ve added three new features to our podcasts — Fanmail (which allows listeners to send us feedback), Podroll (which allows us to add a list of our podcasting friends), and Dynamic content, which you can hear at the end of every podcast we’ve produced so far.

Home page bug: For a few days, clicking on almost anything on the right side of the home page would take you to our donations page. Contrary to popular belief, this was not intentional and has now been fixed.

Mailing lists: We added new subscribers from our various campaigns to 10 of our lists — the largest group was for the new Serbian language list.

News: In the first 22 days of August, our volunteer correspondents posted on average almost 92 stories per day. The most active correspondents this month were Derek, Eric, Pat, Kyle, and Roy.

LabourStart correspondents meeting, August 2024.

Correspondents: We had the first meeting of LabourStart correspondents in a very long time. We had participants from nearly all continents, most of them veteran correspondents, but a couple of brand new ones as well. We will convene these meetings quarterly from now on.

Mailings: We did our first A/B testing of a mass mailing for a very long time, in a mailing promoting the podcasts and campaigns in support of workers at Liberty Steel (Czechia) and Yura (Serbia).

Mailing lists: These grew by 42 this week (last week we added 129). Growth will continue to be slow because it is August and many of our supporters are on holiday, with many union offices closed.

Podcasts: We did a second interview this summer with Judith Kirton-Darling of IndustriAll Europe on the subject of the Liberty Steel campaign (Czechia).

News: In the first half of August (15 days), our volunteer correspondents posted 1,440 news stories — not bad considering how many union websites are closed for the month, with websites not being updated. Our most active correspondents in August were Derek, Eric, Patrick, Kyle, and Pat.

Campaigns: No new campaigns were launched this week and all campaigns are showing slow growth — probably because it’s August and many people are on holiday. I have reminded some of our campaign partners that it is very important to mobilise support in their countries for campaigns that they have requested — which unfortunately does not always happen.

Serbia: In addition to all the usual campaign stuff, I wrote my weekly column for Solidarity on this subject and shared it widely.

Mailing lists: Our lists continue to grow as campaign supporters are added. This week we picked up 129 new subscribers to the list, 70 of them for the English list.

Finances: We now have our first mailing list of donors, featuring people who donated to LabourStart in May and June this year. We will soon begin regular updates to that list.

Correspondents: All correspondents have now been invited to an online meetup on 13 August.

News: Our correspondents have posted 807 news stories in the first 8 days of August, which is extraordinary, considering that so many union websites are not updated this month. The most active correspondents this month have been Derek, Eric, Patrick, Kyle and Pat.

New campaign – Czechia: At the request of IndustriALL and IndustriAll Europe, we launched this campaign on 31.7. By today, it already had 1,721 supporters.

Serbia campaign and podcast: This campaign now appears in quite a few languages and we interviewed a comrade there, sharing this as our podcast. With 3,215 supporters after less than two weeks online, this is already our second largest online campaign. We’ve picked up almost 900 new supporters in the last seven days.

Campaign submission form: The form broke a few months ago — people were submitting campaigns and they were not reaching us. We’ve now migrated the form over to Jotform and this seems to work quite well — and it’s free.

Mailing lists: We finally closed down the Mailchimp account, having migrated all our lists back to Mailjet.

Correspondents: We’ve invited all correspondents to an online meetup later this month; this weekend, we’ll confirm the day and time.

News: On the first day of August our volunteer correspondents posted a whopping 133 news stories. The most active correspondents were Derek, Eric, Roy, Patrick and Pat. Who says August is a quiet month?

Congress of the Education International: We’ve offered complete coverage of this based on stories posted on their website, and publicised this fact widely across social media.

We missed last week’s update, so this report covers the last 14 days.

Campaigns: After a prolonged drought, we now have 4 live campaigns in support of workers in China, Eswatini, Georgia and Serbia. Here are the campaigns and their current total numbers of supporters:

• Georgia: Support striking workers at Evolution Gaming – 1,891
• Serbia: Yura must stop union-busting and negotiate – 2,326
• Eswatini: Recognise the teachers union, respect workers’ rights – 2,611
• China: Release jailed journalists and media workers now – 3,334

The translators have been very busy and most of the campaigns are appearing all the languages. There is a bit of a backlog as many of the translators don’t post the campaigns themselves, and as we transition to a new mailing list system (see below) only one of us is sending out the mailings at the moment.

Two of the campaigns were proposed by unions on the ground and we managed to get the support of European and global union federations.

Other campaigns are also in the pipeline.

In addition, we’ve discovered a new problem with our campaign submission form meaning that for the moment, we’re asking unions to manually submit their campaigns.

Also, the message appearing on our home page when there are no campaigns somehow continue to show for a few days even after campaigns began appearing there again — this has now been fixed.

Mailing lists: As a cost-cutting measure, we are moving from MailChimp to Mailjet, and have already begun doing mailings from the new system. We have migrated 27 of our lists and will migrate the remaining 14 lists this weekend, closing down the MailChimp account early next week. This should save LabourStart something on the order of £8,000 per year.

News: In the first 25 days of July, 38 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,505 news stories — this is a slight improvement compared to what I reported two weeks ago. The most active correspondents in July have been Derek, Patrick, Eric, Kyle and Pat. Next week we will be writing to all correspondents suggesting an online meetup to discuss what’s happening at LabourStart — and to offer help and support to those (the vast majority) who have not been posting news.

Campaigns: We launched our first new campaign since April – China: Release jailed journalists and media workers now. Two more campaigns are in the pipeline, in Serbia and Georgia, and we have reached out to help a union in Bangladesh as well.

Podcasts: We released another podcast this week — an interview with David Edwards, the general secretary of the Education International. Meanwhile, last week’s interview, with Judith Kirton-Darling of IndustriAll Europe, has had more downloads than the previous six podcasts we released.

Mailing lists: After a series of false starts, we have started migrating our lists away from the very expensive MailChimp to MailJet, which we have used before. So far, the process seems relatively painless.  This should save us a considerable amount of money.

T-shirts: While we are unlikely to have t-shirts available in time for the Labour Day holiday in North America, we have made contact with a unionised workers’ coop in the US which can create an online store for us to sell not only t-shirts, but other union swag as well (hats, mugs, etc.) This could help us improve our finances in the future.

News: In the first 12 days of July, our volunteer correspondents posted 1,200 news stories — exactly 100 stories per day. The most active correspondents were Derek Blackadder, Eric Lee, Patrick Craven, Kyle Webster, and Pat Bulmer.

Podcasts: We’ve resumed our podcasts after a gap of about a month; two new interviews were recorded, one of which has now been posted. That interview, with Judith Kirton-Darling of IndustriAll Europe, is already our second most-popular podcast of the last three months after just one day online. We are waiting to hear back from three trade unionists who we invited for interviews.

Mailing lists: To cut our costs we have been looking into alternatives to the very expensive MailChimp. We will be testing using Mailjet again, at least for the English list.

Campaigns: We are likely to shortly resume campaigns following an email conversation with the International Federation of Journalists. We also offered campaigns to IUF, the Education International and IndustriAll Europe and are awaiting their response.

LabourStart Jobs: Canadian jobs continue to dominate this page, as very few correspondents have been posting any. We re-sent the mailing to all correspondents about this, which first went out in February.

Today in Labour History: For some time now we have had issues with updating records here — this is now well on the way to being fixed.

T-shirts: We have begun work on getting another batch of shirts printed and sold by a unionised place in the USA at a much lower cost than our previous efforts.

Books: A review of sales of books we print using Amazon KDP (including ebooks) shows that we sold about 6,500 of these in the last 12 years, earning over £3,000 for LabourStart. We have three new books in the pipeline and will ramp up efforts to get them all published this year. Our best-selling title is Solidarity: Selected Essays by Dan Gallin, which sold 1,045 copies.

Labour films: We are helping out a British trade unionist who has made a short film about workers on strike in the UK.

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.