Inside LabourStart

I’m a bit late with this update – sorry.

Our new Belarus campaign went live on 12 November, appears in 15 languages and currently has 6,906 supporters.

The Marlboro campaign (Turkey) finally went live to all our lists in early November. It too appears in 15 languages and has 5,646 supporters.

The Philippines campaign had just 2,875 supporters last month; it’s now up to 4,495.

We posted our first campaign ever in Greek.

Our mailing lists are growing. In November we added 753 new subscribers, with hundreds of new subscribers to both our English and Turkish lists.

Following the crisis in Twitter, we created a LabourStart account on Mastodon, the free, open source alternative. Our account is called @labourstart@union.place and as of this morning we have 70 followers.

We discovered a problem if one person did multiple translations of a campaign; this has now been fixed.

In late October in Kvareli, Georgia Eric spoke to an audience of 50 young Georgian activists about the trade union movement at an event funded by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.

Eric also met with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation and three NGOs in Tbilisi to discuss our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference, which is currently scheduled for 28 April 2023.  He also visited two universities that might host the event.

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

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

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 82457-74055

French: 7490-7483

German: 5796

Spanish: 5505-5498

Turkish: 4169

Korean: 3311

Italian: 3091-3088

Russian: 2686

Norwegian: 2142-2140

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1492-1476

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 899

Creole:  11

Czech: 60

Danish: 92

Esperanto: 180

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  469-465

Georgian:  135

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  292-293

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  179-178

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 398-386

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 842

Portuguese: 1287

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 947

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 487

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  665-662

LabourStart Translators:  87

Africa Caucus:  63

 

Flickr:

Members:  837

Photos:  9899-9885

 

Telegram:

LabourStart channel:  125-120

 

Facebook Pages/Groups:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13709-13577

LabourStart.org page follows: 14668-14499

Global Labour News and Information: 9027-9025

LabourStart UK likes:  page unavailable

LabourStart UK follows:  page unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 590 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart Brasil:  508-503

LabourStart Turkce:  2126-2102

LabourStart TV likes: 441-444

LabourStart TV follows:  454-455

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Nepal:  6 (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: 2588-2576

Page: 216-209

 

Twitter:

Sporadic efforts were made to grow the Global English-language, Canadian English-language, Australian, Global Portuguese-language feeds.  No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for other accounts.

Global English: 38225-37743

Canada English: 22601-22073

Portuguese: 10687-10217

Global Spanish: 10064-9918

Australia: 9965-9362

USA: 5435-5441

Canada French: 3114-3113

Russian: 46

Hebrew:  48 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 335 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 227-226 (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): 22-21 NEW and not yet active.

 

 

The main news this week was the launch of our Myanmar campaign at the request of the global unions. IUF did a mailing to promote the campaign and BWI posted on their website about it. After just six days online, the campaign has 4,710 supporters and appears in 19 languages, with more on the way.

Many of those 4,710 people asked to be added to our mailing list, but nearly all of them were already subscribed. Our current subscribers are not sharing our campaigns with others in a big way, and without the active involvement of unions, the lists will not grow. We were unable to update the English list yet due to a problem with the file we submitted, but for the biggest six lists other than English, we only picked up 18 new subscribers this week.

We launched two new Canadian campaigns this week but ran into a couple of problems mailing to the Canadians on our English list. First and most important, the mailing was blocked. We have now figured out why, and the mailing went out successfully yesterday. The other problem is that Canadian segment is much smaller than we thought it would be, probably due to a problem when we exported our lists from Mailchimp to Mailjet a few months ago. We are investigating why that happened and will try to restore the list segment to its previous size.

Finally, we continued to raise more money this week, partly due to a mention of our needs in the mailings that went out to support the Myanmar campaign. Since I last reported, we have taken in £1,915.37 into our PayPal account, with other money also arriving as cheques and bank transfers. We are probably over £6,000 in donations since the beginning of September and we expect more to come through (including a substantial donation from a Canadian union).

Yes, we’re opening this week’s blog post with lyrics from George Gershwin’s masterpiece, Summertime.

Many global unions (and others) tend to shut down in August, particularly in the northern hemisphere, and as a result we’ve not gotten any campaign proposals recently. This will almost certainly change in the next week or so as people return to their offices. In the meanwhile …

This week we shut down the Ukraine campaign following President Zelensky’s decision not to veto the anti-union law. We announced this in a mass mailing early in the week, together with the good news from Castorama in Poland, where workers have won a major court battle (we had a campaign on this a couple of years back).

The Belarus campaign finally broke the 10,000 barrier – and today has 10,175 supporters.

Our mailing lists grew by just 66 last week – this is due to not having a new campaign, which would lead to a boost in new subscribers.  This should change soon.

To-do list: From 107 at the beginning of August the list is now down to 60 as we clear up many older tasks, mostly dealing with back-end of the website. We hope to shortly bring this number down to 50.

Ukraine campaign: Some good news and bad news. The good news is that the campaign was a relatively large one for us — in the end, we got 7,090 supporters. The bad news is that President Zelensky ignored our appeal and signed the anti-union bill into law. The campaign will be suspended today.

Poland: Just some good news this time. We’ve heard from UNI Europe that “4 of 10 dismissed union leaders [have been] reinstated at Castorama/Poland”. The LabourStart campaign closed some time ago, but we made a real contribution to that victory.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: We held the first (online) meeting of the global steering committee and have agreed on next steps. The conference will be held in Tbilisi, Georgia next spring and we plan to announce the actual date very soon.

Mailing lists: Following the growth of our Ukraine campaign, we’ve picked up 437 new subscribers to our lists — including 137 new ones for the Ukrainian list. Last week, we added 440 new names to our lists.

Our home page: The technical issues now appear to have been fixed following the corruption of our database last month.

To-do list: We’ve made more progress in reducing the backlog of tasks this month. We started with 107 at the beginning of this month and are today down to just 66. We hope to be around 56 by the end of this month – a much more manageable number.

 

Ukraine campaign: Following our launch in English last Tuesday, the campaign quickly grew to 5,785 supporters and currently appears in 15 languages with more to come. SumOfUs.org helped by encouraging people who support their petition to also support ours (this is a first, and good news). At our suggestion, they cleared their campaign and text with the unions. The unions in Ukraine are helping to build support, and the campaign also benefitted from a re-tweet by the popular British writer and journalist Paul Mason. We received a small number of hostile messages accusing us, on the one side, of being pro-Putin for daring the criticise the Ukrainian government during war-time, and on the other — for being pro-Zelensky and … well, you can imagine the rest.

Kazakhstan campaign: We are running this for a bit longer as the case remains in the courts. We will do a followup mailing today to our list about this.

Iran campaign: We closed the campaign, announcing that one of the two labour rights defenders has been released. This too will be covered in today’s mailing.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: We’ve scheduled a first meeting of the joint local and international steering committee for later this week. We hope to be able to announce dates shortly.

Mailing lists: Our lists have grown as we add more campaign supporters; last week, we picked up 440 new subscribers, most of them in English but also 37 new subscribers to our Ukrainian list.

Home page: I fixed a long-standing software issue with links to the second country (if there is one) for a news story.

Other software issues: Our programmer has returned and resumed work on fixing our database; she will also be available to help with other projects.

T-shirts:I had a long conversation with No Sweat in the UK and we’re exploring the possibility of doing a second t-shirt very soon. Last year’s campaign was quite successful.

Facebook: Our Group (Global Labour News & Information) has come under attack by spammers – though there is no reason to believe that we’ve been singled out. We’ve been deleting the offensive posts and blocking the spammers, have resumed vetting people who try to join the group, and have posted a pinned message to the group explaining what’s going on.

To-do list: As promised, the list of often longstanding items has been dropping steadily throughout August, from 107 to 75 today. I hope to have this list below 60 by the end of the month.

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

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

 

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 73493

French: 7457

German: 5796-5766

Spanish: 5428

Turkish: 4161

Korean: 3308

Italian: 3074

Russian: 2668

Norwegian: 2121

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1476

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 899

Creole:  11

Czech: 63

Danish: 92

Esperanto: 178

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  465

Georgian:  135

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  289

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  178

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 386

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 837

Portuguese: 1287

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 947

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 313

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  662-659

LabourStart Translators:  87

Africa Caucus:  63

 

Flickr:

Members:  837-838

Photos:  10303-10297

 

Facebook Pages/Groups:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13553-13547

LabourStart.org page follows: 14499-14490

Global Labour News and Information: 9011-9013

LabourStart UK likes:  page unavailable-2032

LabourStart UK follows:  page unavailable-2096

LabourStart Francophone: 590 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart Brasil:  502

LabourStart Turkce:  2101-2104

LabourStart TV likes: 443-446

LabourStart TV follows:  455-460

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

 

LinkedIn:

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

Group: 2559-2545

Page: 188-123

 

Twitter:

Sporadic efforts were made to grow the Global English-language, Canadian English-language, Australian, Global Portuguese-language and Global Spanish- feeds.  No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for other accounts.

Global English: 36978-36427

Canada English: 21291-20951

Portuguese: 9606-9193

Global Spanish: 9097-8940

Australia: 9031-8754

USA: 5453-5481

Canada French: 3109-3098

Russian: 46

Hebrew:  48 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508-507 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 335-337 (last tweet 2016)

Indoesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 226 (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): 21 NEW and not yet active.

 

 

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.

Ukraine: Following the Russian invasion on Thursday morning, we have made certain to offer comprehensive coverage of the trade union reaction in Ukraine, Russia and around the world on our news page and across social media.

We have also been in touch with all 18 of our correspondents in Ukraine.  One of them wrote back, saying:

“Thank you very much for your genuine support. At the moment we need as strong an international reaction as possible,  more demonstrations and political pressure on the EU and the governments to react with economic and political sanctions against Putin, his family members and Russian corporations. And Ukraine needs financial and military support as well.  It is also obvious that we will need help in providing humanitarian aid to the union members, refugees and war victims. We appreciate your support and will let you know what that may mean in practical terms.”

Cambodia: Thanks to a mass mailing to members of the UNITE HERE union in the USA promoting the campaign, it jumped to nearly 15,000 supporters — a gain of nearly 2,000 in just one day.

Colombia: Our campaign continues to grow following our follow-up mailing. The number of supporters has grown from 4,809 to 6,092 as a result.

Lithuania: Our campaign went live this last week. Today it appears in 11 languages with more on the way, and has 4,272 supporters.  It will be our first campaign ever in all three Baltic languages — including Estonian and Latvian.

Instagram: Our presence there has been vastly improved and the number of followers is starting to grow.

International Women’s Day: We are now expecting to organise a major online event featuring domestic workers and in partnership with their global union.

Mailing list: Our list continues to grow as we add new campaigns. This week we picked up 399 new subscribers – and launched our mailing list in Lithuanian.

 

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.