Azerbaijan campaign: This now appears in 11 languages with more on the way, and has 2,876 supporters. That number will grow as mailings in the additional languages go out, and following a reminder message to the English list going out later today. This is our first campaign to appear in Azeri and we now have a (small) mailing list for the first time in that language. We got some wonderful publicity about the campaign on this important news site covering the South Caucasus region: International labour movement launches campaign to free detained labour activists in Azerbaijan

Turkey (teachers) campaign: This appears in 13 languages and already has 3,265 supporters which is expected to grow significantly for the same reasons mentioned above.

Alamo Cinema campaign: The union sent us this – “Labourstart proved to be a helpful ally during our strike and we appreciate the work they do and they support they give.” We will share this with our supporters today.

Iran: Yesterday Eric Lee spoke on a panel on a dissident, pro-democracy Iranian TV channel (broadcasting from outside the country). Among other participants in the event was teacher trade unionist Esmail Abdi, who was subject of more than one LabourStart campaign following his arrests.

Interns: Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labour Relations has found 14 students to apply to be a LabourStart correspondent this fall. We have reviewed the applications and created a shortlist of six and will begin interviews next week.

Podcasts: We interviewed US trade unionist Debbie Goldman who has written a book, Disconnected, about organising call centre workers in the US. That interview already has a significant number of downloads even though we haven’t really done a lot of publicity yet. Our podcast page on Buzzsprout now features a significantly longer “podroll” than before. If anyone wants to suggest other union podcasts to include here, please let us know.

USA: We wrote to the Solidarity Center, which has brought legal action against the Trump administration for cutting off their funds, offering to help in any way we can, and reminding them how helpful the Solidarity Center was with our most recent Global Solidarity Conference in Tbilisi.

Donors: We have just under 1,000 people on our new donors’ mailing list, and are regularly sending them updates which are NOT appeals for more money. One of these updates went out earlier this week.

Due to some overseas travel and other issues, I’ve not been updating this blog — the last update was on 1 June.  So this will try to cover the last two months briefly.  I’ll try to keep the updates shorter and more frequent in future.

Campaigns:

• We just now launched a new campaign, together with PSI, in support of a jailed trade union leader in Mexico.  Translations are coming in and publicity happening.  After the first day, we have 2,750 supporters — a good start.
• We closed the Belarus and Georgia campaigns after three months.

Publicity:

• We’ve created the first version of a media list with a few dozen names.  All campaigns, events and conferences will now be sent to them.  Comrades with suggestions of who else should be on this list, please do let us know.
• We have reinvigorated our Instagram account (485 followers) and signed up for a Threads account.  We continue to grow our followings on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn and Mastodon.
• We ran advertising campaigns on Facebook and Microsoft in support of our Belarus campaign, but they produced very disappointing results.

Next book:

• Some of the participants in our recent Global Solidarity Conference have sent in texts of their presentations.  We have about 9,000 words and will probably post this online and perhaps as a print booklet as well.  The texts need to be edited.

Donations:

• We received a very generous donation from the European Transport Workers Federation (ETF) and another from NUPGE in Canada.  In September we will resume our fundraising efforts.

Advertising: We had ad campaigns on both Microsoft and Facebook but with disappointing results, so both have been suspended.  We need to have a re-think about how we promote our Belarus campaign more effectively.

Arabic: We’ve migrated our Arabic language mailing list from Mailjet to a different provider, as Mailjet handled right-to-left languages quite poorly.  And we did our first Arabic language mailing for a long time — in support of the Belarus campaign.  Thank you Assaf for the translation!

Cambodia: We shared Eric Lee’s article about the jailing of a woman trade union leader — but so far we have not been asked to help with a campaign (we did reach out).  The Australian Council of Trade Unions already has an online campaign going.  The article was also posted by the Svensson Foundation in Norway.

Campaigns – Belarus: The campaign is now in Arabic.  The campaign has now also been translated into Polish, but we are awaiting the translation of the mass mailing as well.

Campaigns – Georgia: The Wolt campaign is now in Polish.  Waiting for the mass mailing text to be translated.

Fundraising: The last translated fundraising mailings have now gone out — to our Portuguese, Hungarian and Polish lists.  So far, the mailing went out in 12 languages, but unfortunately it has not yet been translated into German.

Global Solidarity Conference: The Georgian Trade Union Confederation released an excellent video which we’ve shared widely. We also wrote to all the conference participants asking those who spoke in plenaries or workshops to share their texts for a possible book.  (If we don’t publish a book, we will find a way to share the texts online.)

News: As we reported today across social media, LabourStart shared 17,109 news stories in the first five months of 2023 — that’s an average of 3,421 per month, or over 113 per day.  Thank you to all our volunteer correspondents!

The LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference is now behind us.  There’s a summary of what happened here.

In addition, in the last four weeks …

• Mailing lists: We’ve had problems with right-to-left languages using MailJet.  We’ve now tested Hebrew on a new service and it seems to work well.  We’ll migrate our Arabic and Farsi lists there soon.
• Finances: The conference cost us considerably more than we were planning (unexpected costs for hiring the hall, interpretation equipment rental, etc) and we did a successful emergency fundraiser to cover those costs.
• Advertising: To publicise our Belarus campaign we’ve started our first paid advertising campaign in a very long time.  We are initially using Microsoft, but have also applied to use Facebook again.  That campaign is now up to 6,420 but it could be much higher.
• Georgia campaign: Just before the conference opened we launched a campaign in support of Wolt workers in Georgia.  Today it has 5,080 supporters.
• Upcoming campaigns: We are expecting campaign proposals shortly from unions in Namibia and Israel.

With a lot going on, ironically, this will have to be a very short summary of everything that’s happened so far in April.

Global Solidarity Conference:  With just 7 days to go, we have a packed schedule and 404 registrants from 80 countries.  Not all of those people will come, as many are experiencing difficulties getting visas, while others registered thinking that this was to be an online conference.  Nevertheless, we expect hundreds of attendees.

New campaign – Belarus: To mark one year since the crackdown on unions by the regime, we have launched a major campaign with the support of the Belarusian unions and global unions too.  In the first 24 hours online, the campaign picked up over 2,000 supporters and many translations have come in.

New campaign – Georgia: On the same day, we launched a campaign in supporting of striking couriers in Georgia.  This campaign coincides with our conference in Tbilisi so we expect to be able to do some on-the-ground, face-to-face solidarity.

Please do what you can to share and promote those campaigns — and see you in Tbilisi!

Global Solidarity Conference 2023

With just 4 weeks to go, the number of people registering to attend the conference is growing by the hour.

Right now, we have 252 registrants from 66 countries, and of those 219 are from outside Georgia.

It’s possible that some of those people will not received visas or the financial support they need to come, but we can already see that this will be a large conference.

Plus we have new confirmed plenary speakers and workshops.

Belarus: We closed our current campaign as we are planning to launch a new one shortly.

This campaign had 8,134 supporters and appeared in 17 languages.

Our comrades remain in jail.

Israel: We gave extensive coverage to the unprecedented general strike in Israel this week.

And we have just learned that two representatives of the Histadrut will be coming to our conference as well.

I have been in Georgia now for 11 days and have met with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC) who are our partners for the event, as well as the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the Solidarity Center, who are both providing generous assistance. We have 200 registrants at the moment — the number seems a bit lower than it was because we’ve actually had to remove quite a few duplicats, and a number of people registered but are not able to attend. The Georgian numbers are still quite low, but this will change as GTUC begins to invite its own members. We don’t have a proper agenda yet, but we have many workshop proposals and plenary speakers and an agreed timetable:

This will be a brief post as nearly all the work this week has focussed on our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference.  Some highlights:

The conference web page now appears in 4 languages – English, Georgian, Russian and Ukrainian.

As of this afternoon, there are 184 registrants from 59 countries — 155 of them from outside Georgia and 29 from Georgia.  We’ve picked up 42 new registrants this week. These numbers will grow in the next week, especially as we begin signing up Georgians in larger numbers.  We are also seeing more people volunteering to run workshops and speak at plenaries.  We hope to have a draft agenda ready in the next week or so.

On Sunday night, Eric Lee will travel to Georgia to spend two weeks working there.

We marked International Women’s Day with posts on social media and with our annual message to correspondents about how to tag stories so that they appear on our Working Women page, which was amended this year to feature Norwegian for the first time.

Meanwhile, our amazing volunteer correspondents continue to do great work sharing labour news from around the world.  They’ve posted 7,524 labour news stories since the start of the year.

More next week …

Our latest graphic advertisement for the conference, shared widely today on social media.

Global Solidarity Conference: This conference is continuing to attract new registrants and new ideas for content (workshops and plenary sessions). As of today, we have 142 people registered from 50 countries; of those 23 are from Georgia and 119 from abroad. We expect these numbers to grow siginificantly in the next few weeks. Eric will be in Georgia from 12 March for two weeks and will work closely with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation to ensure the conference’s success.

Poland IKEA campaign: This campaign had 6,242 supporters last week; this has grown to 6,704. We are still missing translations into some key languages, including German and French.

Donations: The Norwegian union Industri Energi has made another very generous donation to LabourStart.

Campaigns: With the agreement of the union in Canada (ACTRA), we have closed down the campaign there.

Mailing lists: Boosted by the Poland IKEA campaign, we added 319 new subscribers to our lists this week — with 209 of those going to the English list and the Polish list growing by 67.

Programming: We continue to make small improvements to the functioning of LabourStart. On the page showing which correspondents have posted news today, we used to show only the total number for this month — now it’s also showing the total for the whole year so far.  In the first two months of 2023, our volunteer correspondents posted over 6,500 news stories.

Global Solidarity Conference: We continue to sign up new people to attend. As of today, we have over 130 registrants from 44 countries — an increase of nearly 50% since last week. The conference website now appears in a Georgian language edition. We’ve now sent out the first weekly newsletter to conference registrants.

Poland IKEA campaign: This campaign has taken off in the last week. We currently have 6,242 supporters and the campaign appears in 12 languages.

Internationalisation: It turns out that we weren’t translating into French the names of all Canadian provinces, but this has now been fixed.

Kazakhstan campaign: As I reported last week, we have now closed this campaign after a very long time, and we’ve now received a report from the union which we can share.