Inside LabourStart

Another very busy week:

Campaigns:

New campaign launched in support of PKC workers in Mexico, together with IndustriALL. Two days after launch, the campaign had over 6,300 supporters — including nearly 140 for the Finnish edition. As a result, and including some earlier efforts, we now have probably over 500 Finnish email addresses.

The UK-only RMT campaign has grown from 2,600 a week ago to over 3,200 today — by far our biggest ever campaign that was only publicized in a single country, and proof of what can happen when we team up with a local union that knows how to mobilize its members.

The Korea campaign continues to grow, but not as quickly as we’d like. It’s now up to 10,250 — and needs more than 1,000 more supporters if it were to be our largest current campaign. We wrote to every PSI affiliate last week about this campaign.

Our comrades in the Philippines have now made an effort to boost support for their month-old campaign, and the result is 22 supporters in Tagalog — our first campaign ever in that language. They’ve sent us the text for a Spanish version as well, which should go live very soon.

Upcoming campaigns: We’re still waiting on a final text from Australia on a campaign to support Bob Carnegie.

Czech campaigns: Four out of six people on our list responded favorably to my request for assistance, so expect to soon see campaigns in Czech, and an active email list (we already have 65 addresses).

Esperanto campaigns: I’ve written to our small list to see if there’s any interest in doing campaigns (and reviving our news page) in this language.

Book sales: Last week I reported that we’d sold just under 500 copies in 5 weeks; today I can report that we sold a total of 543. Book sales following a campaign launch remain high – we sold 4 copies yesterday and 10 copies the day before that.  I’ve had to order another 100 copies from the publisher, as I expect to sell some at upcoming trade union events we’ve been invited to in Oxford, Bournemouth and Swansea.

UCS book: In the hands of the publisher; we should have some news on this within a few days.

Articles: I had my first articles on the British TUC’s Stronger Unions blog and the ITUC’s Equal Times website.

Fundraising: February has, so far, been a good month. We’ve taken in £4,549 so far (not all of that donations to LabourStart — some is paid work that I did). If that continues (unlikely, but we can hope), it may be our best month ever.

London fundraiser: We’ve begun serious discussion with friendly entertainers about doing a London fundraising event. More details soon.

Our contribution to IndustriALL’s week of action in support of Mexican workers is this campaign.  Please support it and spread the word.

This will be our first campaign in Finnish, by the way.  (The company is Finnish – as is IndustriALL’s General Secretary.)

Campaigns:

• Korea campaign: Still growing, but not yet at 10,000.  We’ll be writing to every PSI affiliate in the next few days to get them on board.
• Mexico campaign: We’ll be doing our bit as part of the IndustriALL-sponsored Week of Action; our campaign should be launched on Monday the 11th in support of Los Mineros; we have the full backing of the United Steelworkers in the USA and Canada on this one.
• UK campaign: We launched our biggest-ever UK-only campaign, in cooperation with the RMT.  They emailed and texted all their members about it, producing a sudden sharp increase in the number of supporters.  This is now up to almost 2,600 supporters.  UK campaigns will now show on the UK news page.
• Australia campaign: Expect a campaign in the next day or two in support of Bob Carnegie.

Languages:

• Tagalog: We’ve had our first two campaigns translated into this Filipino language; we’ll now begin creating newswires and publicizing this.
• Polish: We have now had a couple of campaigns translated and a mailing done to our list.  Six of the 20 Polish people who signed up to our most recent English campaign volunteered to translate campaigns in future — so it looks like we’re reviving our project.
• Czech: Following up on the Polish model, I contacted the small number of Czechs who had signed up for the most recent campaign in English; several of them have volunteered to help get campaigns up in their language.  We have a mailing list of 65 Czech trade unionists, so this can probably grow fairly easily into 100 or more.
• Chinese: We’ve now added the campaigns to the home page in Chinese and Lennon has suggested a number of changes to improve the page.  The number of Chinese supporters for our most recent campaign has grown considerably thanks to Lennon’s efforts.
• Korean: Our first campaign to get more than a handful of Korean responses has meant that we finally have a small, but growing, Korean mailing list.
• Vietnamese: It’s been a while since we’ve had a campaign appear in Vietnamese, but we’ve gotten the latest one translated and hope to begin growing a base of supporters in this language.
• Japanese: Mac has resumed translations — and publicity — so the Korea campaign is available in this language and has had some significant support in Japan.
• Indonesian: We’ve now added the campaigns to the home page in this language too.  All our campaigns are now showing on their appropriate home pages — if we have campaigns in that language.  Otherwise, the English campaigns are usually shown.
• Portuguese: We were able to get the latest campaign up and mailing out thanks to the PSI staffer in South Africa who has volunteered to help with this very important global language.
• Finnish: We’ll have our first Finnish language campaign next week – the Mexico campaign, which targets a Finnish employer.

Annual survey on trade union use of the net: We’re going to launch this one soon, have collected some very good suggestions from senior correspondents and others.

Mailing lists: We continue the transition from MailChimp (very expensive) to Sendy (very cheap).  All lists except for English and French have been moved over.  We need to work on issues like templates and segmentation, but are on the case.

Inactive correspondents: We’ve seen a large drop in the number of correspondents we’re showing because we have one-by-one been contacting, and then dropping, those who are inactive.  We may be down to 450 by the time we’re done.

LabourStart in Numbers: See my report this week — we haven’t seen spectacular growth anywhere, but all our Asian language lists have grown in recent days.

Security: Some of the pages on our campaigns site were exposing some email addresses of supporters – these are now password-protected or in the process of becoming password-protected.

Book [1]: We now have a Kindle edition of our campaigns book — we’ll begin publicizing this shortly.  Sales of the book remain strong; we’ve sold just under 500 copies in 5 weeks.

Book [2]: I completed the first draft of a book for Union Communication Services entitled “Making Unions Stronger – Using the Internet Better”.  A second draft is being sent off tomorrow.  Thanks to Edd and Derek for reading the whole thing through.

Fundraising: Not a great response from the GUFs and others we approached recently.  Today I’ll do a mailing to our “power users” — people who support our campaigns all the time, and will know how to value our work.  I need the help of all of you to raise funds to sustain our ever-growing campaigning.

This is a bit of a record for us.

LabourStart’s ActNOW campaigns are usually translated into 10 or 12 languages, even though we have the capacity to do many more.

The Korea campaign, which is hugely important and popular (rapidly approaching 10,000 supporters) is the first one we’ve done to be translated into more than 20 languages.

In addition to all the “usual suspects”, this campaign appears in some languages that are either new or ones we have rarely used, at least recently, such as Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Tagalog (coming), Portuguese, Polish, Farsi, Turkish, and Dutch.  (I’m now working on getting it into Czech.)  I hope that this week we’ll see this campaign in 22 languages — or more.

In all cases, we have been doing mailings as well, reviving our connection to many hundreds of our subscribers in Polish, Portuguese, Dutch, etc who have not been hearing from us regularly.

Even if some of these lists are quite small, it’s very important that we create the capacity to reach out quickly to trade unionists in so many countries.

I’m enormously appreciative of the work done this time by Andy, Espen, Gisela, Mohammed, Hyunsu, John, Lennon, Catta, Nelson, Andrea, Masha, Mac, Dirk, Molly, Eyup, Assaf, Anka, Ali, Trung, Miles and and Fambisa.

New campaign: We launched a new campaign in support of Korean government workers, whose president is on hunger strike.  This is the first campaign we’ve ever done that’s picked up any supporters at all in Korea, and was quickly translated into that language (among many others).  We’re already over the 5,000 mark and hope for this to turn into a large campaign.

New mailing list system: I have experimenting with Sendy and have to say that so far, am very pleased. It works, it’s cheap, and the tech support has been great.  (This is taking a lot of time, but as it will save us something like £5,000 this year, it will be worth it.)

Book 1: I’m completing the writing this week of Making Unions Stronger – Using the Internet Better, which will be published by UCS this year.

Book 2: Sales continue to go well for Campaigning Online and Winning (473 sold so far) and we’ve had offers to translate into French and German.  We have a Kindle edition of the English version ready, but it needs some tweaking.

New language: Our friends at the KMU in the Philippines have given us a translation of our campaigns framework into Tagalog – spoken by an estimated 28 million people.

Newswires: All the regional newswires are now working.

Coming soon: The third annual survey of trade union use of the net.

With Christmas nearly upon us, work is beginning to slow down – not taking on any new, major projects (and, I hope, no new campaigns) before the new year.

Successful campaigns book: This is now complete, with an introduction by the IUF’s Ron Oswald.  It runs more than 60 pages and we should be able to submit it to Amazon tomorrow (Wednesday) and should have books in hand by the end of the year.  The working title is Campaigning online – and winning: How LabourStart’s ActNOW campaigns are making unions stronger.

Labour newswires: We’ve now set up and tested labour newswires in JavaScript and RSS for the four nations of the UK – England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.  (This was Edd’s first ‘techie’ job, editing and uploading the files.)  We’ll be promoting these to UK union websites, hoping to grow our base of UK sites using our newswires from 20 to 40.  In the process of doing this, we discovered we had no recent stories from Wales, so we’ve added some and are following up with our Welsh correspondents to make them active.

Today in Labour History: Did more work setting this up; a version now appears on the front page of the website, but this is a very rough draft.   (The PHP version will look much nicer.) We have our first additional volunteer to help (from New Zealand), so we’re now a team of 3, but I hope we’ll begin recruiting others soon.

Book of the month: This month we promoted a subscription to International Union Rights; we earn £8 per sub sold, and as of yesterday morning we’d sold 33, so we’ve made £264,  This is more than we made in the previous four months selling books with UCS.  It is less than I’d hoped (I was hoping for at least 50 sales, maybe 100), but this is still much better than we normally do in a month.

Internationalization of campaigns: Edd reviewed how our campaigns appear in different languages and we found a number of places where English was still appearing.  I wrote to all our translators and we’ve made quite a few fixes in the Spanish, French, Norwegian, Indonesia, Vietnamese, and Chinese versions of campaigns.

New correspondents: We’ve added several new ones, including two more from Taiwan, our first active correspondent in the Bulgarian language for some time, and more.

Facebook: I wrote to key correspondents about doing additional versions beyond our English, French and Turkish pages.  Some interest has been shown in creating Indonesian and Chinese pages.

New site design: I spent several hours crafting a new front page for English (which could be the template for other languages).  It’s three columns wide, contains many more images, has a larger font, and features a much simpler navigation.  (That’s a screen shot of where we stand now with this, above.)  I hope to have something to show you all in 2013, but the adventurous among you can ask me for the URL so you can see the work-in-progress for yourself.

Closed campaigns: We’ll be closing the Guatemala campaign after three months today.

Global Solidarity Conference: I had five individual calls with Australians last week, one each day.  I spoke with 4 members of the organizing committee plus Peter Lewis from Essential Media. We took a decision to make this a free conference and to drastically streamline the registration procedure. As a result, we’ve jumped from 5 Australians attending to 33, and a total of just under 50 registrants. We expect many more in the days to come as we finalize the conference agenda and begin to highlight who the guest speakers from overseas will be. I’ve begun weekly mailings the complete Australia / New Zealand list (just under 6,000 addresses) and to all those who’ve registered. In addition, I’ve been doing daily mailings to the 25 or so people on the organizing committee list.  We have less than 35 days to go …

Interns: Today is interview day; I will be interviewing all 4 of the shortlisted candidates as well as giving them a written assignment.

Office: Now largely unpacked, office is looking like a place one can actually work in.

Campaigns: I closed down the RMT campaign. I sent off the biweekly message to all our partners updating them on the status of all campaigns and asking for their help. I also did the monthly reminder to all translators about what they may have missed. I cleared the backlog of translated campaigns and mass mailings. There was a problem with campaign ID numbers, which someone managed to reset to 0, but I fixed this. I also made a small techie change – we had a problem if someone chose to opt out from the mailing list signup in that they wouldn’t be included in the count; this is now fixed. We have been asked to help UNI promote a campaign in support of ING workers in Korea and will do so this week.

UnionBook: The link to UnionJobs, which showed the most recent jobs, has broken so I’ve changed it and moved it to a more prominent location.

Publicity: I and two volunteers distributed 400 LabourStart brochures at the 20 October TUC march and rally in London. This is the first time we have intervened in this way and it went well.

Hebrew edition: My message – in Hebrew – to our list got us one new correspondent. I’ve continued to push our Israeli correspondents to be more involved and to try to feature more news from Palestine and other countries.

To be fair, I was away for more than a week …

Intern: We had 12 applicants. Derek Blackadder (Canada) and John Wood (UK) helped me prepare a shortlist of 4, who will be interviewed on Monday, 22 October. Roger Darlington has volunteered to assist with the interviews.

Conference: We’re working hard to build this — it’s only 6 weeks away. We did a mailing on 24.9 to our lists in Australia and New Zealand. I’ve provided the organizers with a list of who to invite from the region, and have been in touch with several others from outside the region whose flights we are subsidizing.

New campaigns: We launched a campaign in support of workers in Guatemala; we ran a short and sharp campaign in support of jailed Turkish trade unionists; we launched a campaign in support of labour NGOs in China facing repression.

Closed campaigns: I closed down five campaigns – China (Li Wang Yang), UK (RMT Olympics), Turkey (Togo), Morocco and Kazakhstan.

Labour book of the month: I’ve revived this, and in the first 4 days, we sold over $600 worth of books.

Facebook: I tested the promotion of one of the posts on our page. This was the post – “Over 300 dead textile workers in Pakistan – demand justice! Support the online campaign!” It was seen by 63,151 people, 713 of them liked it, 23 commented on it, and 150 shared it. A typical post on Facebook is seen by a tiny fraction of that — usually around 5,000 people. The cost was $100.

Sponsorship of LabourStart UK: UIA, which provides insurance cover for union members here, now has a banner on our UK website, for which they are paying us.

Ukrainian: We have a new newswire in Ukrainian, following a request. I’ve also provided them with a list of country names for translation.

Urdu: We had an offer to translate our Pakistan campaign, but there’s been no translation yet.

Swedish & Danish: We’ve done a mailing to our small lists in these two languages to try to recruit new correspondents and translators.

South Africa: I’ve written both to all our existing correspondents and to hundreds of our readers there in an effort to get more active correspondents.

Brochure distribution: I’ve recruited three volunteers to help me distribute LabourStart brochures at Saturday’s giant demonstration and march organized by the Trades Union Congress in London.

Campaigns:

• I cleared the backlog of translations of campaigns and mass mailings.
• Two new campaigns were launched – Swaziland (7 August) and Turkey DHL (8 August).
• I fixed the mycampaigns.cgi script — while it was working OK, it was forcing the system to use the old website addresses and forwarding.
• The Iraq campaign was closed with fewer than 4,000 messages sent.
• We assisted Unite Here and the IUF with promoting their own campaigns this week; in the former case, this also consisted in giving them a lot of constructive criticism about how to campaign globally.
• Two campaigns were given a special boost this week – the RMT campaign in support of London cleaners on Friday when a 48 strike as launched with picketing outside the Olympics venue, and the Hava-Is campaign for Turkish airline workers – because of the new ITF video.  The last of these is our largest campaign at the moment, with well over 8,000 messages sent.

Ukrainian edition: I added 9 correspondents – Masha is co-ordinating this effort.  The interface is already working.

London Labour Film Festival: I’ve been promoting this to our lists and via social media.  LabourStart is getting a quarter-page ad in the festival program.  We are also allowed to distribute our brochure at the door.  The festival takes place in mid-September at the Prince Charles Cinema in central London.

App: We’ve been sent an interesting proposal by a company in Canada offering to do this for us; now under consideration.

Conference 2012: Now little more than 3 months away.  The organizing committee is meeting again next week.  A draft registration form is now ready and a bank account has been set up.  Proposals are being discussed for panels.

Conference 2013: There’s been an offer to host this in Vancouver.  More details soon.

Office in London: I continue to search – have found one very good candidate on Thursday, am looking at another on Monday and will probably decide then.  Packing up of the existing office has already begun.

Fund-raising: We received a substantial one-off donation from the IUF.

Upcoming conferences I’ve been invited to speak at: UNITE Wales in Cardiff in September (“Fifty shades of campaigning“); NASUWT in London in November; Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) in New York City next June.  (I will be contacting some of you for help on organizing a panel for the last of these.)  I also hope to attend the TUC in Brighton in early September.  These are all also opportunities to distribute the LabourStart brochure (1,900+ copies remaining).

Other writing: The current wave of anti-union repression we’re seeing in places like Nigeria and Turkey is the subject of my next regular monthly column for Jungle World.

This is a bit delayed because I was on holiday from 13-20 July but now back at work and making progress on several issues.  Here are some highlights:

Conference: Our organizing committee continues to function; I have a conference call scheduled with them for next week.

Correspondents: The internal messaging system is now fixed; there had been a problem before that spam could be sent, though not via email, to all correspondents.

Campaigns:

• Closed: The Unite bus campaign in the UK was closed down following a victory. Another Unite campaign, in support of MMP workers, was closed down after three months.
• I added a key to the flags and languages here.
• We asked for and received the support of IndustriALL in the Kazakhstan campaign.
• New campaigns launched in support of sacked trade unionists in Peru and Turkey, and RMT cleaners in London.
• I fixed a bug in our special news pages for the UK, USA, Canada and Australia – we were not showing lists of the most current campaigns there, but we are now.
• Closed and archived campaigns – When trying to view certain closed campaigns, you couldn’t actually call them up – but I’ve now fixed this and you can see any campaign. I fixed the display of supporters for a campaign which has been closed. There’s now an accessible archive of closed campaigns.

Office: I’ve begun an intensive search for a London office.

Mailing list: We now have more than 100,000 addresses.

Book: I was approached by UCS, our book-selling partner in the USA, about doing a primer for trade unionists on use of the net.  I’ve agreed to do so.  Details to follow.

Internationalization:

• A problem was discovered with part of the display of the Turkish website; this is now nearly fixed.
• Work began on a Ukrainian edition – also nearly complete.

Newswires: Two more unions added the labour newswire to their sites.

Fundraising:

• The IUF has agreed to make a substantial donation to LabourStart.
• In addition, we’ve received several large donations from Canadian unions.
• We had 2,000 copies of our new fundraising brochure printed and I have begun mailing them out one by one to selected unions; the first target audience is Irish unions.