Inside LabourStart

Turkey Marlboro campaign: This campaign is going live this weekend. Thanks to DISK’s efforts, we already have 384 supporters, most of them for the Turkish version.

Philippines campaign: This campaign finally went live globally this week, and already has 2,875 supporters, and appears in 4 languages with more on the way. One of these is Greek, for which we now have a volunteer translator.

Canada campaign: Our campaign in support of locked-out actors already has 6,253 supporters, making it larger than four other current campaigns.

2023 conference: Eric Lee will be in Tbilisi this coming week to meet with meet with partners and supporters and to choose the venue. We hope to hold our Global Solidarity Conference in late April next year.

Arthur Svensson international prize for trade union rights: Nominations are now open for this important prize, which LabourStart won in 2016, and we’ve publicised it very widely in our mass mailings and across social media and our news page.

Apologies for the delay in posting this update.

Philippines campaign: We just launched a new campaign in support of workers’ rights in the Philippines, at the request of the KMU.

Canada campaign: We launched a campaign in support of 28,000 locked out actors — initially it was Canada-only, but we’ve now gone global with it and it has over 5,000 supporters already.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: Eric will be visiting Tbilisi in another 11 days and will meet with local trade unions and other partners, and visit possible venues for the event.

Radio Labour: For some reason, the feed of their latest stories had disappeared from our home page. This has now been fixed.

Translators: We wrote to all 89 volunteer translators on International Translation Day (29 September) to thank them for all they do.

Belarus campaign: We have been informed that a new campaign will be launched shortly and we will then be able to close down our long-running current campaign, which has 10,210 supporters. It is currently our largest campaign.

Kazakhstan campaign: As our comrade Erzhan Elshibayev is still on trial, the unions have asked us to keep this long-running campaign live for a time, and we are doing so.

Myanmar campaign: The campaign has grown somewhat to 5,596 supporters and appears in nearly two dozen languages with more on the way.

Conference 2023: The first mailing (a simple ‘save the date’) went out on Thursday. Translators were sent the text today so the news can be shared much more widely. We are already seeing signs of interest in the conference.

Canadian campaigns: We have two campaigns running but growth has been hindered by the fact that following our transition from Mailchimp to Mailjet, our Canadian segment of the English mailing list has gotten much smaller. We are looking into way to fix this. Here are the two campaigns with the number of supporters –

• Canada: Union-busting Puts Public Safety at Risk! – 91
• Canada: End the Actors Lockout! – 803

Donations: September has, so far, been a good month for our fund-raising, as we took in £10,490.27.

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.

In Ukraine, workers demonstrate against the new anti-union law.

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.

We’re back to weekly updates.

Campaigns: We launched a new campaign on Friday in support of Ukrainian trade unions.  We’ll be keeping our Kazakhstan campaign live for a bit longer as we wait for news from the union.

T-shirts: We’ve scheduled a call with an organisation in the UK that does union-made t-shirts as a possible new way to produce our shirts this year.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: This week we’ll be writing to the members of the steering group to schedule a first meeting (on Zoom).

Our to-do list:  We’ve had a very long to-do list for some time now, and it was 104 a week ago.  It is now down to just 83 and I hope to continue to reduce it throughout August, aiming to reach 60 by the end of the month.

Software issues: The programmer who assisted us recently is back from holiday this week so we should be able to move forward with more fixes and improvements to the website.

Conference 2023: We have begun work planning our next Global Solidarity Conference — which is long overdue — in Tbilisi.  The Georgian Trade Union Confederation has named its members of the steering committee and we have invited members of the LabourStart Executive to participate as well.  We hope to have the first meeting of the joint committee very soon.

Iran: We have raised workers’ rights cases in Iran with three global union federations — IndustriALL, the ITF and Education International.  EI has requested to be included as a sponsor of our current campaign; we have asked about whether they want a separate campaign for a teacher activist.

News database: The work repairing this continues as we consider moving the whole database to a different web hosting company.  (Support from our current hosts has been non-existent — and they caused the problem in the first place.)

New correspondents: We added three new correspondents last week from Canada (Iran), Germany and Hong Kong (UK).

Campaigns: We had been invited to prepare a campaign in support of a workers’ rights activist in Kenya, but the company caved and agreed to the demands before a campaign could be launched.