Jun
01
2023
0

Ads, Arabic, Cambodia, Campaigns, Fundraising, Global Solidarity Conference followup, 17,109 news stories – another quiet week at LabourStart

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!

Feb
24
2023
0

Trade unionists from 44 countries are coming to Tbilisi

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.

 

 

Nov
24
2022
0

Belarus, Turkey campaigns go live

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.

Feb
11
2022
0

Three new campaigns coming?

 

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.

Nov
05
2021
0

Weekly update: Jordan campaign takes off

Algeria: Expect a new campaign shortly — we’ve been given a heads up from IndustriALL.

Jordan: Our new campaign has taken off and already has more supporters (6,020) than our two most recent camopaigns. That’s the good news; the bad news is that a court has ruled against the union.

Nigeria: Our first campaign in the Yoruba language has now gone live and we have begun publicising it.  So far, no one has signed up to the campaign.

Sudan: We shared widely Eric’s column about the role of unions in the fight for democracy and against the military coup.

Donations: We received a very generous — and unexpected — donation from Education International.

Mailing lists: We picked up another 133 subscribers this week; this is more than triple what we added last week.

T-shirts: We’re about to embark on a join effort with DNA Merch in Germany to sell workers’ history themed t-shirts on a monthly basis.

Oct
29
2021
0

Weekly review: New campaign launched in support of Jordanian teachers

Jordan: We launched a major new campaign in partnership with the Education International and the support of the ITUC. The campaign had 2,802 supporters after one day online.

Nigeria: We are shortly expecting our first campaign to be translated into Yoruba, and we will publicise that fact widely — we’re to be first global union website campaigning in an indigenous African language. Yoruba, by the way, has about 50 million speakers.

Sudan: We’ve had a lot of coverage of workers’ responses to the military coup, and shared this widely across social media on Wednesday.

Sweden: We’ve had a soft launch for the Zalando campaign now that SAC has begun to promote it, and we will do much more in the coming days.

Zimbabwe: We have a new correspondent who has begun posting news.

Labour newswire: We’ve begun to fix some long term problems here. With the help of a webmaster of a local trade union (scroll to the bottom of the page) in the state of Washington (USA), we managed to fix the state and provincial newswires for the whole world. We’ll fix this on the website and announce, and move on to fix any others that have stopped working.

Mailing lists: These continue to grow slowly. Before the launch of the Jordan campaign, we were able to add just 43 new subscribers to our lists.

Oct
21
2021
0

Weekly update: Iran, Italy, Myanmar, Poland, Puerto Rico, Turkey & our interns

Iran campaign: We received a translation of the mailing into Farsi from IndustriALL, and have sent this out to our Farsi list.

Italian edition: We changed one of the permanent links on the home page.

Italy: Eric’s article on the attack on CGIL was shared very widely across social media, including by leading figures on the British Left and Labour Party.

Myanmar campaign: We created a special petition format to allow campaign supporters’ names to be delivered to the credentials committee of the UN General Assembly, at the request of BWI.

Polish: For some time now we have been adding daily news from one of the two Polish national trade union centres (OPZZ) to our Polish-language news page. From this week, we are also adding news from Solidarnosc.  Our campaigns are appearing in Polish, though we still need to sort out regular mailings to our Polish list.

Puerto Rico: We held a webinar in Spanish with English translation in support of the campaign. Despite technical glitches, and thanks to Euan’s efforts at PSI, the webinar had good attendance, especially from Latin America. DSA’s publication, Democratic Left, is running a major piece on the campaign with a link.  With 7,610 supporters, it is our second largest current campaign.

Turkey: At long last, the article about Cihan Erdal and co-authored by Peter Tatchell and Eric Lee, appeared in print in the British daily Morning Star. It was widely shared online.

Interns: We have begun work with a second intern, Bunmi, from York University in Toronto. Our other intern, Cam, has been working on an updated version of our online campaigns book, discovering some good victories that we should publicise.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Intern,Internationalization |
Sep
01
2021
0

New campaigns coming for Egypt, Puerto Rico and Sweden? And more news in our weekly update

Egypt: Following recent developments at Lord International we have reached out again to our partners asking if the campaign we created now needs to go live.

Europe: We had a very positive online meeting with EFFAT, the European food workers’ union.

Global: We are helping publicise the ‘Essential for Recovery’ event next week which is being sponsored by ITUC, UNI Global Union, and others.

Puerto Rico: We have reached out to the electrical workers union offering help with their struggle.

Sweden: Our not-yet-launched campaign is on hold for another two weeks while we wait for the decision of the local union, who have gotten back to us.

Fundraising: UNI Global Union has made a very generous donation.

Global labour calendar: We have begun work on this, aiming to have it ready for publication by 1 October.

Internationalisation: We wrote to our Arabic correspondents from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen asking for their help to revive the page and to translate our campaigns. We did the same with our Hebrew language correspondents, two of whom have now responded favourably. We made a number of additional improvements to both the Arabic and Hebrew editions this week. We also reviewed the Farsi language edition of LabourStart and noted next steps. Other languages will follow.

Jobs: We listed another dozen jobs in the last two weeks and have done a weekly round of publicity across social media. Correspondents are encouraged to help with this as all the jobs being posted are coming from the UK and Canada for the moment.

Aug
25
2021
0

Global Labour Calendar – how you can help – and more news from the last week

Our 2014 calendar.

Global Labour Calendar: We plan to have this ready and on sale on 1 October. If you have any great labour photos that we might consider using, please email canada@labourstart.org. If you have ideas for dates we should mark on the calendar, please email ericlee@labourstart.org.

Afghanistan: We have reached out to both national trade union centres in the country, and have also engaged with the ITUC. We continue to upload news stories from unions abroad about Afghanistan, mostly from the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).

Egypt: We have a campaign ready, but have been asked to place it on hold for the moment.

Iran: We are discussing launching a new campaign with an NGO that campaigns in support of jailed trade unionists, Free Them Now. More details soon.

Myanmar: We are in discussions with a Danish trade union about a possible campaign.

Internationalisation: Having largely completed the fixes to our Hebrew page, we’re now turning our attention to LabourStart’s Arabic language edition — including efforts to revitalise our core group of volunteer correspondents across the Arab world.

LabourStart Jobs: We continue adding jobs, mostly from Canada and the UK for the moment, publicising them across social media every week.

News database: We’ve continued work on the problem of countries whose names have changed. From this week, correspondents will no longer have the option to use the older names of a number of countries, including Swaziland, Burma and East Timor (though people will be able to view news posted under those names in the past).

Aug
18
2021
0

Afghanistan, Egypt, Hungary, Iran, Israel, Puerto Rico, Sweden, Turkey: LabourStart is there to help

August is quiet time for many people and even some trade unions — but not for LabourStart.

We’re responding to a number of new appeals for help which come in every day …

Afghanistan: We’re posting any comments and statements by unions which we can find, and have been sharing posts across social media as well.

Egypt: We are just about to launch a new campaign in support of workers at Lord International – details this coming week.

Europe: We have been reaching out to the various European regional organisations of the global union federations, and this coming week will have a call with another of the general secretaries.

Hungary: After a slow start, the campaign has picked up quite a bit – and currently has over 5,200 supporters. We raised the question of Hungarian support for the campaign with ETF.

Iran: A group that campaigns to release jailed trade unionists has reached out to us and we’ve scheduled a call for later this week to discuss joint actions.

Israel: We learned that the workers at 10bis, for whom we campaigned earlier this year, have won a big victory in the courts. We’re waiting for an English translation of the news to appear, and it’s already on our Hebrew language edition. In addition, we made further improvements to how our news shows in Hebrew (and other languages) on the country pages, having fixed the main home page last week.

Puerto Rico: We’ll be following up with several emails in the hope of providing some support for electricity workers there, possibly a campaign.

Sweden: We have prepared a new campaign and are waiting for the green light from the union.

Turkey: We have now closed our campaign in support of Cihan Erdal. The campaign had 7,172 supporters and appeared in 16 languages. As we wrote: “Cihan was ordered released from custody on 15 June 2021. He has to report to the police twice a week and cannot leave the country. Hearings will start again in September 2021.

LabourStart Jobs: We did the first round of publicity for our new project — https://www.labourstartjobs.org — and will do weekly bursts – including a mailing to our subscribers, and highlighting some key jobs.

New correspondents: We added four new correspondents this week, two from the USA and one each from Morocco and the UK.

Our home page: We had a problem — the second country in a news story was rendering in the correct language on one part of the home page (the bottom) but not the other parts. This is now fixed — the country name is now correctly translated across the whole page.

Powered by WordPress | Aeros Theme | TheBuckmaker.com WordPress Themes