Inside LabourStart

Global Solidarity Conference:

We had an online meeting with our Georgian partners, and also calls with several more officers and staff at various global unions.

Eric Lee will be visiting Tbilisi to work on the conference for two weeks in March.

If you’d like to attend the conference (28-30 April in Tbilisi, Georgia) please sign up here: https://www.labourstart.org/2023/register.html

Fundraising:

Our appeal went out in six more languages, reaching another 6,916 people.

But we have still not received translations for some of our larger mailing lists.

BWI has made a very substantial donation.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: Much of the work in the last week has consisted of online meetings with leaders of global unions and others regarding content for the conference — and participants.  We have a growing list of likely workshops, many of which sound absolutely amazing.

We also have a logo (to the left).

Philippines campaign: We closed this after three months online; the campaign had 5,049 supporters.

We have asked the union for an update.

Fundraising: An appeal to our English list (and two other lists) netted about £2,000.

Translations have come in for some other languages and these will go out shortly.

We lost two good comrades last week, both of whom appeared at LabourStart conferences in recent years — Shane Enright in the UK and Myrtle Witbooi in South Africa.

Shane, who had been on the staff of the ITF, worked for Amnesty International UK and was in charge of the trade unions, where he did exemplary work over years.  Among other things, he arranged for our 2008 LabourStart conference in London to be hosted at the Amnesty headquarters.

Myrtle was the inspiring leader of the domestic workers movement, first in South African and later as President of the International Domestic Workers Federation.  She gave a memorable speech at LabourStart’s 2014 Global Solidarity Conference in Berlin and also spoke at our online International Women’s Day event last year.

May their memory be blessed.

In other news …

Global Solidarity Conference: Last week we had good calls with leaders of two global unions, and there’s a call next week with another. We’re getting very good feedback on the conference. Meanwhile, we now have a logo and a working registration form in English and Georgian, and we have a page that shows all registrants.

Fundraising: We did an appeal to all LabourStart correspondents yesterday — so far, with minimal results.

The news of the attempted fascist coup in Brazil was the focus of some work this week as we sought out, and found, statements by global unions and others and shared these very widely both on our news pages and across social media.

Inevitably, much of the work in the last week took place behind the scenes as we prepare for our upcoming Global Labour Conference in Tbilisi. In recent days we scheduled or held calls with global unions and other partners regarding content and participation. We also discussed with our Georgian partners the issue of a budget and logo. Work is nearly done on a registration form which will work in Georgian and English (and probably Russian as well).

We also had some luck with fundraising this week as our global union and European partners were once again generous in their donations to LabourStart.

Global Solidarity Conference: We had another meeting with the Georgian trade unions and agreed on a conference theme and the next practical steps.

Today in Labour History: This wonderful feature on our home page (the work mainly of Derek) doesn’t get enough attention. Today we promoted it across all our social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram and Mastodon.

Fundraising: We have reached out to all the global unions, including some which have never previously donated to us before, in an attempt to improve our financial situation as the new year begins.

Programming: We continue to fix things in the software that drives LabourStart.

A correspondent pointed out this week that one could not change the date of a new story to ‘2022’ — this has now been fixed.

In addition, the RSS newswire is now working correctly for German, French and Norwegian; previously only the Spanish version had been fixed. All the others will soon be working as well.

New Year’s Resolutions: We shared this graphic widely across social media:

The final week of 2022 was destined to be a relatively quiet one as many union offices shut down for the holiday.

Nevertheless, we did a few things at LabourStart …

• We sent out an end-of-year mailing to all our correspondents. This encouraged them to contact us if they’re having difficulty logging in to post news, to help recruit new correspondents and to publicise our news page more widely.
• Our mailing lists grew this week as we added 52 more subscribers from the new campaign supporters.
• We did more work to publicise our Belarus campaign across social media. That campaign now has 7,938 supporters — a gain of 50 in the last week. We also shared widely the ITUC statement condemning the sentences handed down to the jailed leaders of the trade union movement in that country. (Unfortunately the ITUC has not yet translated the statement, so it’s only in English.)
• We continued work fixing LabourStart’s back-end. This week that included dealing with a bug in the caption for our photo-of-the-day feature, as well as problems with character encoding on our home page for some Spanish-language stories. We continued work creating new and fixed RSS feeds for a number of countries. Unfortunately, not all of these yet function correctly, but we’re continuing the work.
• We continued this week with discussions with our partners in Georgia in the run-up to our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference at the end of April.

In 2023 we’re looking forward to working harder and smarter to defend workers’ rights and rebuild union power all over the world. Thanks to all of you for all that you do — and happy new year!

ITUC: We continued providing unparalleled coverage of the Qatargate scandal, including the first reports online about the ITUC General Council meeting this week.

Belarus: We continued to share news and promote our campaign as the trials began.  We currently have 7,888 supporters for this campaign.  We are also in discussion with the Danish union 3F about supporting our efforts.

Trade Union News from Finland: After a quarter century, this website is finally closing down. We have worked closely with them over the years and we shared the news of their demise widely.

Radio Labour: We don’t do enough to promote this remarkable project, so last week we did a social media blitz to help raise awareness of it.

Mastodon: Our following continues to grow on this Twitter alternative, but slowly. We’re now up to 212, a gain of 28 this week.

2023 Global Solidarity Conference: Following a Zoom call with our colleagues in Georgia, we are going ahead with this. Expect a rush of announcements in early January.

Programming: We have now fixed the RSS feeds for four countries (Australia, Canada, UK, USA), which had been broken for some time. We will be copying the source code for other countries and languages now that we have this fixed. And then we will publicise this again to our lists, encouraging individual trade unionists and their unions to make use of our newswires on their websites and blogs.

We seem to have missed a week with updates – sorry about that.

ITUC: The arrest of the newly-elected ITUC General Secretary Luca Visentini last Friday in Brussels has rocked the trade union world. Next week the ITUC General Council will decide on the next steps; meanwhile, Visentini has stepped aside. We have provided very extensive coverage in many languages, both on our website and across social media, and will continue to do so.

Mastodon: Growth of our account has slowed. Two weeks ago, just before our webinar, we had 144 followers. Today that’s up to 184. Still, we’re getting lots of great followup to our webinar, including features on Radio Labour and the Union Cities radio show from Washington D.C.

2023 Global Solidarity Conference: We have a call set up for next with our friends in Georgia, and we hope to be able to announce more details of the event soon.

Programming: We continue to make tweaks every day to LabourStart’s software; we are currently working hard to fix our newswires which worked very well for a time but have now broken in some places. We hope to announce good news in the next several days about this. Also, after being informed by a new correspondent in Korea, we made the login for correspondents more secure.

Myanmar: We closed the campaign at the request of BWI. Though it appeared in a record-breaking 25 languages and had the support of nearly all the global unions, it was a fairly small campaign for us.

Belarus: This remains our largest current campaign and is just under 8,000 supporters. We gave the campaign a recent boost and hope to see an increase in the number of supporters.

Backlog: We achieved “inbox 0” again last week, and there is no backlog of campaigns or translations at the moment.

As the crisis at Twitter deepens, many people have begun to use alternatives — most notably, Mastodon.  Our account there, which has been live for just two weeks, has 144 followers and is growing every day.

This week we announced on social media and in a mailing to the English list that we’d be hosting a webinar today (Friday, 2.12) to introduce Mastodon to trade unionists.  We’ve gotten Tim Wilde, the founder of The Union Place server on Mastodon, to join us on the panel.  Over 225 people from 44 countries — including nearly all the global unions — have signed up to participate.  The webinar is being recorded and we will make it available on the weekend.

In order to pre-register people, we had to create a signup page and a small database, which was done.  This tool can now be easily modified and recycled for other events, both online and offline.  We’ve been tweaking and improving LabourStart’s back end every day this week and continue to plough through a very long list of changes that need to be made to the site.  It’s a slow process but we are moving forward again.

Meanwhile, we’re waiting to hear back from our partners in Georgia about our planned Global Solidarity Conference there in April.  Once we have spoken to them we should have some more news.

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.